What is Reactive Maintenance?
Reactive maintenance is a method of performing repairs and maintenance on a machine or system when problems arise. It's often used in conjunction with proactive maintenance, which involves performing preventative checks and adjustments to machines and systems before they have any problems.
Reactive maintenance can be useful because it allows you to address issues immediately, but it can also be costly and time-consuming if you don't have the right tools or staff members to deal with each issue as soon as it arises.
Types of Reactive Maintenance
Emergency maintenance is a crucial activity that should be taken immediately to protect the safety of guests and employees, or to maintain critical business operations. Issues that cannot be put off must be addressed right away to prevent significant losses. Emergency maintenance may carry increased costs if the supply of important parts or labor are scarce. Emergency maintenance can be caused by a number of things. Sometimes, it's just a glitch in the program that causes some kind of error. On other occasions, it might be a problem with the hardware—for example, if one of your servers has stopped responding.
Corrective maintenance is a type of maintenance that does not create immediate safety or operational risks to the business. Corrective maintenance refers to problems that do not need to be corrected immediately, because the broken part is not essential to the operations of the equipment as a whole, or if the asset itself is not essential to daily operations. Managers have time to shop around for part prices and labor quotes, as well as schedule a maintenance team to correct the issue. In some cases, managers may choose to ignore the maintenance task to prioritize other work or budget.
Run to Failure Maintenance is a deliberate maintenance plan that allows an asset to continue operations until it breaks down and is in need of repair. Run to failure is implemented on assets that are not valuable enough to require ongoing preventive maintenance and monitoring, are plentiful enough that backups can cover the down time or are not integral to the continued operations of the business. Examples of run-to-failure maintenance include basic electrical assets such as light bulbs, televisions and telephones. These assets can easily be replaced in short order and do not require ongoing status reports to ensure uptime.
