What is secondline maintenance?

Answer 1

First it is important to understand first line maintenance. First line maintenance is the maintenance that is performed by the assigned maintenance staff for certain equipment or other asset. These are the people that come in and perform the planned/contracted maintenance. Usually these are standardized activities that are performed on regular intervals.

As a part of this maintenance some difficulties may arise, or the status of the assets can be such that additional maintenance activities are needed. When these activities can't be done as part of the regular (first line) maintenance, these activities are replanned and not seldom performed by other, more specialized staff. This is called the second line maintenance.

In some cases even third line maintenance exists. This will be the case when the second line maintenance staff can't solve the problem due to for example a design error or the unavailability of spare parts (that became obsolete). In this case the asset should be changed/improved, and this is sometimes called third line maintenance.