Preventive Maintenance Guide
Preventive maintenance becomes useful when standards, execution cycles, and evidence remain clearly connected.
MAINTENANCE
Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance
Preventive maintenance is planned before failure. Corrective maintenance responds after a fault or service issue appears.
The practical difference
Preventive maintenance is scheduled because the organization expects a recurring need: inspection, cleaning, calibration, testing, servicing, or replacement at a controlled interval. Corrective maintenance begins because something is already not working as required.
Why both matter
A facility cannot run on corrective work alone without accumulating outages, emergency costs, and missing history. It also cannot pretend preventive work eliminates all incidents. A mature operation manages both intentionally and documents each path clearly.
- Preventive work supports control, readiness, and asset life
- Corrective work restores service when something fails
- Both need priorities, owners, documents, and closure evidence
System implications
Preventive work is easiest to manage when recurring standards remain separate from each execution cycle. Corrective work is easiest to manage when reports, actions, vendors, and closure stay linked to the same incident record.
See how SHIFTFM separates recurring standards from active incidents.
Use the recurring-work and maintenance pages to compare planned work with live request handling.