Maintenance
Maintenance is the work that keeps machines able to do their job. Its goal is the capacity a plant needs, not the machines themselves.
EN 13306 counts more than the repair. It includes the checks, the planning and records behind them, and the management decisions that set priorities. It also covers the whole life of the machine, not only the time after a failure.
What is maintenance?
EN 13306 does not limit maintenance to the person with the wrench. Technical work counts, from inspection and diagnosis to repair. So do the administrative work around it, such as planning and documentation, and the management work that decides what to do and with which resources.
Repair is therefore one part of maintenance, not a synonym for it. The standard splits the technical work in two: observing and analyzing the state of the machine, and active actions such as repair. A plant that only repairs does the second half and skips the first.
So a job counts as maintenance even when no tool is involved. A technician who writes down the cause of a failure, so the next shift finds it fast, is doing maintenance work.
What is maintenance for?
The standard lists several objectives a maintenance organization can serve, among them availability, cost, product quality, and safety. Plants cannot maximize all of them at once, so someone has to rank them. The standard calls the management method that meets the chosen objectives a maintenance strategy. Examples are how you spend your resources and whether you outsource work. Maintenance strategies compared covers how to choose one.
We recommend this ranking rule: start from the capacity the plant needs. Which machines must run, for how many hours, and what does an hour of stoppage cost? Then rank machines by criticality and spend technician hours there. This is principle 2 of the Maintenance Manifesto: "The goal is capacity assurance." It says that you do not maintain equipment for its own sake, but to keep the function it gives the business.
What are the types of maintenance?
EN 13306 sorts maintenance into three types. Preventive maintenance comes before a failure. Corrective maintenance comes after a fault. Improvement makes the machine more reliable, safer, or easier to maintain. Predictive maintenance is not a fourth type: it is preventive work triggered by a forecast. Types of maintenance shows the full tree and sorts real jobs into it.
Which numbers does maintenance track?
The numbers have glossary pages: MTTR, MTBF, availability, and OEE. Two more measures sit in Metrics: first-time fix rate and maintenance backlog. The knowledge a team needs at the machine has its own section, starting with why knowledge gets lost.
Sources
- EN 13306:2017, Maintenance: Maintenance terminology, CEN, 2017. Introduction, clauses 2.1 (Note 1), 2.3 (Note 1), 2.4, 7.1 to 7.4, 7.6, and 7.9. This page explains the standard in our own words; the standard is the authority. Buy it as DIN EN 13306:2018-02 from DIN Media.
- Maintenance Manifesto, 2025, principle 2.
In this section
Foundations
- Types of maintenanceEN 13306 sorts maintenance into three types. Preventive work comes before a failure, corrective work after a fault, and improvement makes the machine better.
- Maintenance strategies comparedReactive, preventive, condition-based, and predictive maintenance, what each costs, and when each one makes sense.
- Failure vs faultA failure is an event, the moment a machine loses a function. A fault is the state that follows. A machine without power cannot run, but it has neither a failure nor a fault.
- Uptime and downtimeEN 13306 splits a machine's time into uptime and downtime. Downtime is only the time lost to preventive maintenance and faults, not every hour the machine stands still.