Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP) Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Guide to Master Your Certification!

Corrective maintenance involves activities that are required to rectify a failure that has occurred. It is often referred to as repair work aimed at restoring an asset to its functional state after it has malfunctioned. The key aspect of corrective maintenance is that it occurs in response to a prior failure, meaning that it may lead to new work being generated as the necessity arises to address issues or deficiencies identified during the repair.

For example, if a piece of machinery fails during operation, the team performing the corrective maintenance may discover that other components are also worn or damaged. Therefore, this maintenance could result in additional tasks that were not included in the original work scope, making it an integral part of the maintenance strategy designed to ensure that systems operate reliably.

Other maintenance types like preventative maintenance focus on scheduled tasks to prevent failures from occurring in the first place, reactive maintenance is typically unplanned but does not necessarily stem from prior work, and scheduled maintenance is planned and executed based on time intervals or usage. Corrective maintenance is specifically reactive in the sense that it responds to unforeseen issues arising from previous maintenance operations or operational failures.