Maintenance vs. Repair: What's the Difference?

Repairs are restoration work for when something breaks, breaks, or stops working.

Maintenance

is routine activities aimed at preventing damage and extending the life of appliances, fixtures, and the property itself. Examples include regular cleaning of air conditioning units, grease traps, repainting, and the like. Technically, repairs can also be considered maintenance work (corrective maintenance).However, the difference between repair and maintenance work is that repairs aim to restore functionality, while maintenance seeks to preserve functionality.

Repairs are work done after assets or equipment fail, and while this may seem obvious, it's an important part of the definition. Costs incurred to return an asset to a previous condition or to keep the asset operating in its current state (as opposed to upgrading the asset) are also charged to repair and maintenance expenses.Routine maintenance, such as engine adjustments, oil changes, radiator discharge, etc., is essential for keeping assets in good working order.

Predictive maintenance

techniques are designed to help determine the status of equipment in service to estimate when maintenance should be performed. For the maintenance team, it's important to try to use maintenance to avoid repairs, since repairs are more costly in several ways.There are many different maintenance strategies you can combine, depending on your assets, industry, and the size and experience of your maintenance team.

This type of maintenance involves analyzing all possible failure modes for each piece of equipment and creating a customized maintenance plan for each individual machine.

Predictive maintenance

aims to predict failures before they occur so that maintenance can be done at the right time. Those who are interested in using cloud-based maintenance platforms to organize, automate and streamline their maintenance work should not hesitate to contact us if they have any questions.Although chronologically much older, it is considered a section or practice within the broader and newer field of predictive maintenance, where new AI technologies and connectivity capabilities are put into practice and where the acronym CBM is more often used to describe “condition-based monitoring” rather than maintenance itself. Advances in recent years have allowed for extensive equipment instrumentation and, together with better tools for analyzing condition data, today's maintenance personnel are more able than ever to decide when is the right time to perform maintenance on any piece of equipment.When used together in a sentence, the easiest way to differentiate between repair and maintenance is to think of “repair” as something that occurs after an asset suffers a failure, while “maintenance” generally refers to maintenance actions that are performed to keep assets in good working condition and try to avoid unexpected machine downtime. Second, the introduction of CBM will entail a major change in the way maintenance is performed and, potentially, across a company's entire maintenance organization.For example, you schedule inspections and preventive maintenance tasks using a combination of manufacturer recommendations and asset maintenance and repair histories.

In short, reactive maintenance often means more downtime and higher maintenance costs when not used strategically. .