Learn About Maintenance Applications

Maintenance is applied across different industries and used for the upkeep of manufacturing plants, commercial facilities, residential properties, and the equipment within them. By maintaining buildings and equipment, companies can meet the needs of employees, customers, and stakeholders. Proper maintenance allows people within buildings to work effectively or live comfortably. It also allows building managers to meet expectations (e.g. production goals and customer satisfaction levels).

For different maintenance applications, different types of maintenance, maintenance software, and maintenance workers are required. For instance, a food company with a food processing plant may use preventive maintenance to increase equipment uptime and schedule PMs with CMMS software. Industrial engineers and maintenance technicians will carry out this work. A small apartment complex, on the other hand, will use reactive maintenance and use property management software to manage maintenance tasks. No in-house engineers will be staffed and contractors will be hired for repairs outside the technician’s scope of work.

As you can see, the maintenance application you should use depends on your building’s function and the type of assets and people within it. Below, we’ll summarize the different applications.

Industrial Maintenance

Industrial maintenance, also referred to as plant maintenance, is the application of reliability best practices to increase equipment uptime in a manufacturing environment. When equipment is working as expected, manufacturers can avoid roadblocks in the production phase of the supply chain. The main types of maintenance used for industrial maintenance are preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance.

Facility Maintenance

Facility maintenance is the process of increasing the utility of a building by regularly servicing capital assets, commercial appliances, and areas inside or around the building. Capital assets include machinery, robotics, research equipment, and medical devices; commercial appliances include boilers and HVAC units; and areas include rooms, hallways, parking lots, and garages. Preventive maintenance is used to reduce the amount of work requests and complaints from employees and occupants.

Property Maintenance

Property maintenance is used for the upkeep of residential buildings like hotels, apartment complexes, retirement homes, and buildings used in the hospitality industry. Fire safety and cleanliness are top priorities for property managers who use property maintenance software to delegate cleaning tasks to janitors and fire safety checks to technicians. Property maintenance is highly reactive because most work is completed by technicians after work requests are submitted by tenants and customers.