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How to Handle Corrective Maintenance in UniAsset

4 minBeginnerLast updated: January 2, 2026

How to handle corrective maintenance

Corrective maintenance is unplanned work — the response to something that has broken or failed. In UniAsset it is a work order with the type set to Corrective.

When to use this

Raise corrective work when a fault has been reported, an asset has failed, or an inspection has turned something up.

If the work is on a schedule and nothing has failed, that is preventive maintenance instead.

Requirements

  • Available on: Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos
  • Roles: Owner, Admin, Manager to raise one

Steps

  1. Go to Dashboard → Work Orders and click New Work Order.
  2. Choose the asset that failed.
  3. Set Type to Corrective.
  4. Set the priority honestly — Emergency only for safety risk or a stopped operation.
  5. Describe the symptoms in the description, not the assumed cause.
  6. Create, then assign it.

Full field reference: How to create a work order.

The automatic path

You do not always have to raise corrective work yourself.

A failed checklist item raises a corrective work order automatically. When someone completes an inspection checklist on a work order and marks an item as failed, UniAsset creates a corrective work order referencing that asset and that failure.

This is what makes inspection worth doing. A failed check produces a repair task without depending on anyone to remember. See Checklist templates.

What happens next

Corrective work versus an incident

They are different records and often both apply.

Corrective work orderIncident
PurposeGet it fixedRecord what happened, as evidence
CapturesLabour, materials, time, costSeverity, occurrence time, threaded notes, and a locked snapshot of the asset
Use whenSomething needs repairingThere was an accident, injury, or a significant failure someone will ask about later

A serious failure usually deserves both: an incident for the record, and a corrective work order for the repair.

Common mistakes

Recording the diagnosis as the description. "Bearing failed" may be wrong. "Grinding noise from drive end, vibration under load" survives being wrong.

Closing corrective work without a cost. Corrective spend is the number that drives replacement decisions. A blank cost hides it.

Raising a new order every time the same fault returns. Reopen the original instead — the linked chain is what shows a recurring problem.

Skipping the incident record for a serious failure. The asset's state at the time cannot be reconstructed later. The snapshot only exists if you report the incident.

Troubleshooting

Work Orders is locked. Corrective work orders need Orbit or above.

A corrective order appeared that nobody created. A failed checklist item raised it. Open it to see the failure it references.

I can't set the type after creating. Set the type when you create the order.

The cost isn't reaching my reports. The order must be Closed, and cost reporting needs Orbit or above.

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