Curative Maintenance

While both curative and corrective maintenance occur after a failure, there is a crucial difference in their scope and intent. Corrective maintenance focuses on the immediate fix: replacing the broken part to get the system running again. Curative maintenance goes deeper.

What curative covers

Curative maintenance involves a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to understand why the failure happened in the first place. Its goal is to cure the underlying problem, not just treat the symptom.

Two examples

For example:

• Corrective: A tire repeatedly goes flat. The corrective action is to patch or replace the tire each time.
• Curative: The technician investigates and discovers the tires are consistently being punctured by debris in a specific part of the yard. The curative action is to implement a new cleaning procedure for that area. The problem is solved permanently.

Why the nuance matters

Curative maintenance is a cornerstone of continuous improvement. It requires more initial effort in analysis but leads to significant long-term benefits by increasing overall reliability, reducing recurring failures, and lowering total maintenance costs.