Maintenance is an important aspect of keeping equipment running smoothly and efficiently for as long as feasible. There are numerous types of maintenance strategies when it comes to CMMS that could benefit your company. In this article, we’ll specifically focus on preventative vs. reactive maintenance and cover the benefits and disadvantages of each.

Compare Top CMMS Software Leaders

According to Statista, 42% of companies spent 21-40% of their operating budget on maintenance supplies in 2021.

It can be difficult to assess how often a machine should be turned offline for maintenance and to balance the costs of lost production time against the risk of a potential failure.

Since operations and maintenance are inextricably linked to both downtime and expense, facilities frequently postpone it in the hopes of increasing output and profit. Most maintenance organizations try to deal with this challenge by performing a difficult balancing act between maximizing the usable life of a part or asset while avoiding machine downtime.

What this article covers:

• What is Preventative Maintenance?
  • Primary Benefits
  • Disadvantages
• What is Reactive Maintenance?
  • Primary Benefits
  • Disadvantages
• Final Thoughts

What is Preventive Maintenance?

We need to maintain many appliances in our daily lives on a regular basis. Whether it’s changing the car battery every year or updating the operating system on our computer, we all follow the recommendations. Why?

We put our money into equipment that we use every day, and we want them to last for as long as possible. Similarly, businesses want their investments to last a long time. This is known as preventive maintenance in the maintenance industry.

Preventative maintenance (PM) refers to routine maintenance that extends asset, equipment and infrastructure life spans. Adjustments, cleaning, lubrication, repairs and replacements are all part of preventive maintenance. 88% of facilities outsource some or all maintenance operations while 40% apply preventative maintenance using analytical tools.

Preventative maintenance is the process of resolving minor issues before they become major ones. The basic goal is to limit the likelihood of a piece of equipment, component or spare part breaking down or deteriorating. Teams must evaluate the history of equipment and keep track of previous failures in order to implement preventive maintenance. This determines how often or when equipment might break down and require repair or service.

Preventative maintenance is also a part of many CMMS software features. It makes it easy for a company to organize its maintenance tasks and ensure long-lasting productivity.

Primary Benefits

Some of the benefits of preventive maintenance are:

1. Lower Maintenance Costs

Maintenance costs can be one of the biggest financial sinkholes, depending on the type and complexity of the equipment a company uses.

Preventative maintenance can help avoid this problem by reducing the chances of a significant breakdown or decline in equipment performance.

Additionally, organizations can now profit from preventive maintenance software. These systems generate maintenance checklists on a regular basis and aid in the coordination of company-wide maintenance initiatives.

2. Early Detection of Malfunctions

One of the most basic preventive maintenance operations is disassembling and thoroughly inspecting equipment and facility installations.

While it’s the most effective approach to clean and polish equipment from the inside out, it also serves to identify some hidden defects that a surface diagnosis might miss.

Production lines can benefit from the early identification of issues because they are the ones to cause lengthy downtime.

In the long term, replacing dirty or partially damaged parts on a regular basis may eliminate many significant defects. Managers can upgrade or install new functional software to implement auto-diagnosis and defect detection. Additionally, certain CMMS products may do an entire facility’s maintenance check in a single cycle. Some systems even construct an IoT infrastructure to consolidate equipment performance data. A single manager can detect flaws before they cause major harm.

3. Reduced Downtime

For maintenance processes, both static installations and running machinery must be partially or totally turned down.

Preventative maintenance is almost always faster and uses fewer resources than other maintenance methods.

Most modern operating systems, such as production lines and electrical equipment, contain performance management sensors that identify specific problem areas. In that case, instead of shutting down the entire system, only those issues can be isolated and repaired.

With preventive maintenance, you have the option of scheduling the maintenance operation at a convenient time (for example, when employees have left the building or operations have ended for the day), reducing production and efficiency disruptions.

4. Longer Asset Life Spans

Every piece of equipment has a limited life span, after which it requires repair or replacement in varying degrees.

Companies typically buy such equipment after determining its potential run and production. Most organizations already factor in the cost of repair or replacement. Still, preventive maintenance might offer an added layer of protection to extend equipment life spans.

Preventative maintenance schedules ensure that assets are operating in accordance with manufacturer and consumer specifications.

Get our CMMS Software Requirements Template

Disadvantages

Preventative maintenance can have certain pitfalls. They include:

1. Possible Over-Maintenance

You still run the risk of over-maintenance with preventive maintenance. Some failures are not as dangerous to your operations as others. If you are putting resources into preventing every problem, you might be wasting resources on PM. It is critical to strike a balance between proactive failure prevention and reactive repair work.

When preventive maintenance programs are applied too broadly, they can result in significant financial waste. You should test components, parts and even entire machines for potential failure in some cases.

2. Unexpected Failures

Certain components and parts may fail at random, to the point where preventive maintenance is powerless to prevent that failure consistently. In such cases, it may be more prudent to consider effective ways to deal with the consequences.

You shouldn’t determine the frequency of preventive maintenance jobs by the common metric of mean time between failures. Instead, consider the useful life of a component when making this decision.

3. Continuous Training for Technicians

Another disadvantage of some preventive maintenance systems is that field technicians’ don’t always keep their knowledge and training up to date.

The bottom line is that if your maintenance professionals don’t understand the necessity of preventive maintenance jobs or don’t receive adequate training to perform them, they will fail to execute them correctly.

4. High Upfront Costs

When you first implement a preventative maintenance program, it will cost you more to repair equipment and the facility on a regular basis than it would to wait for things to break down.

Small businesses may find the initial costs of using a CMMS for preventive maintenance excessive if they have a restricted budget for asset management and equipment maintenance.

Since checking assets for maintenance happens on a regular basis, you may need to invest in the latest tools and equipment in order to carry out the maintenance operations properly, which will undoubtedly raise your overall business expenditures.

What is Reactive Maintenance?

Reactive maintenance is the process of responding to equipment failures or breakdowns after they have occurred to return the asset to normal operation. This is in contrast to the preventive maintenance approach, which aims to predict equipment problems ahead of time and take efforts to avoid them.

This maintenance approach, sometimes known as “run to failure,” does not schedule routine inspections, part replacements or other proactive tasks. Assets remain in use until they are exhausted. When equipment breaks down, reactive maintenance comes into play to repair it and restore it to full functionality. This approach is common when an asset has little impact on productivity, critical functions or operations. Reactive maintenance might be appealing because it maximizes asset use and, as a result, manufacturing output by pushing the asset to its limits.

Reactive maintenance can be a cost-effective strategy for your company, as it takes less time and money to have equipment repaired when it breaks down rather than undertaking routine maintenance to prevent a breakdown. However, reactive maintenance should not be your sole maintenance approach for equipment repairs, as it is generally unsustainable in the long run for expensive machinery.

Receive Advice From the Experts

Primary Benefits

Some of the benefits of reactive maintenance are:

1. Lower Upfront Costs

Reactive maintenance will save you the money you would normally spend upfront on preventative maintenance and labor costs. However, depending solely on reactive maintenance and completely ignoring preventative maintenance can be detrimental to your business in the long run.

2. Fewer Employees Needed

With reactive maintenance, you’ll be primarily concerned with resolving issues as they happen. That way, you won’t need a large team of technicians on hand to manage equipment at all times.

Preventative maintenance requires you to have at least two technicians at the facility to conduct timely inspections to detect problems in advance. This also translates to additional salaries, thereby, increasing team size and labor costs.

3. No Planning Required

Preventative maintenance requires preplanned machine downtime for inspections, part replacements and other maintenance activities. There is no advanced planning or scheduled equipment downtime with reactive maintenance. However, this could mean unpredictable equipment failure in the future.

Disadvantages

Reactive maintenance can have certain disadvantages. They are:

1. More Expensive Overtime

Late orders, ruined reputations and lost sales are all common outcomes of unexpected delays during manufacturing runs.

Furthermore, equipment may fail at inconvenient periods when people and parts are scarce. In such instances, companies may have to pay a premium for after-hours help, commuting and emergency parts.

2. Unexpected Equipment Downtime

Equipment downtime is the major disadvantage of reactive maintenance, which can result in business closures or a production standstill for several days.

Downtime is especially problematic in the manufacturing industry, as it can result in layoffs or even the closure of entire factories for an unknown period of time.

3. Overtime for Employees

You may have to pay overtime for staff who are accountable for the equipment in question, in addition to the initial financial loss that reactive repair usually entails. For example, if one or two employees use the failed machine more frequently than others, you may find that you require their vast knowledge of the damaged machine while you investigate repairs.

Compare Top CMMS Software Leaders

Final Thoughts

When it comes to maintenance management, reactive and preventive maintenance are typically pitted against each other. Choosing a plan for your company that aligns with your functionality and needs can be a difficult option.

Maintenance expenditures account for a significant portion of operating costs. Many unforeseeable and uncontrollable situations occur, resulting in additional expenses that are difficult to predict in advance but are strongly tied to maintenance.

So, what are your thoughts between preventive vs. reactive maintenance? Which one would you choose for your business? Let us know in the comments!