Maintenance has not always existed as we know it today; it has gone through several stages to reach its current form. Although this process was not intrinsically connected to the industrial revolutions, the development of maintenance procedures greatly influenced the industrialization process.
We will explain this entire timeline so you can understand how we arrived at the present moment, where technology is now part of a factory’s daily routine.
In the past, with the emergence of the first industries around 1914, maintenance was not part of the routine. At that time, there was no strong pursuit of productivity.
Therefore, there were no inspections or similar activities. Maintenance only occurred when a machine completely stopped. In such cases, those responsible would intervene to try to restore the machine’s operation.
Basically, everything depended on corrective maintenance. Only basic services, such as equipment cleaning, were routinely performed.
With the arrival of World War II, there was an urgent demand for the highest possible productivity. From that moment on, frequent breakdowns became a problem, and maintenance evolution took another important step.
Faced with such urgency, preventing breakdowns became the priority. Routines began to emerge for repairing failures that could cause machines to stop completely.
These were the first signs of preventive maintenance. At that point, the need to plan and anticipate shop-floor problems became clear, since production line stoppages directly affected a factory’s productive capacity. Therefore, avoiding breakdowns by all possible means became essential.
With an increasingly expressive number of industries, maintenance continued to evolve. The need to predict machinery failures became increasingly urgent.
A clear example of this evolution occurred with the emergence of commercial aviation. From that moment on, more than ever, ensuring optimal machine operation became critical; otherwise, everyone’s safety would be at risk.
In addition to the growing popularity of preventive maintenance, efforts were made to make it more technical and professional. From that point forward, maintenance began to be viewed in a more analytical way.
Beyond predicting and anticipating shutdowns, it became necessary to understand what led to those scenarios. As you can see, the field has come a long way to reach where it is today.
With the emergence and expansion of computers from the 1970s onward, maintenance became even more sophisticated. Technology became part of daily planning, control, and maintenance analysis.
Preventive maintenance also evolved. As a result, machine interventions began to occur only when truly necessary.
In the following decade, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) emerged in Japan. This new technique enabled even more significant advances, not only in maintenance environments but throughout the entire factory.
Since then, countless ways of managing and performing maintenance have been developed. Maintenance ceased to be seen as an emergency-driven and often improvised activity and became a strategic and technological area.
Computers are just a simple example of how technology has been integrated into maintenance environments. Today, countless other technologies are part of this scenario: sensors, software, intelligent machines.
The current scenario would have been almost unimaginable in the previous century. In this sense, the arrival of Industry 4.0 and its innovations tend to make maintenance even more agile and assertive.
In the future, machines will not only perform self-diagnostics to identify failures, but they will also be able to keep this data stored. With this, artificial intelligence will be able to analyze these data and generate insights into what can be improved in Maintenance Planning and Control (PCM).
Although it may seem distant from our current reality, this transformation is likely to occur faster than we imagine.
According to the Innovation and AI Growth Index in Brazil—where the largest number of AI companies in Latin America is concentrated (42% of the total)—the number of artificial intelligence companies jumped from 120 in 2018 to 206 companies in 2025.
However, AI is just one example. Many other innovative technologies are becoming part of daily industrial life, such as the Internet of Things, Big Data, and cloud computing. This scenario of constant innovation reflects high expectations for the future of maintenance.
