Preventive Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance

Asset and equipment maintenance is critical to any facility’s operational efficiency. The right approach to maintenance activities can go a long way toward limiting unexpected downtime so that maintenance managers can focus on strategic improvements rather than fighting fires.

Managers are free to choose from a range of maintenance strategy options. Among them, reactive and preventive maintenance are two of the most common approaches. With reactive maintenance, teams respond to unexpected failures as they occur, while preventive maintenance involves making repairs according to a set schedule to optimize asset performance and limit equipment malfunctions and breakdowns.

A good maintenance plan helps find and maintain that balance between reactive maintenance and preventive maintenance. This guide compares predictive maintenance vs. reactive maintenance, exploring definitions, real-world examples, and how and when to incorporate these approaches into your maintenance plan.

Key Takeaways

• Preventive maintenance is a proactive, scheduled approach to asset care, while reactive maintenance addresses issues only after equipment fails
• Preventive strategies in facility operations help reduce downtime, extend asset life, and improve workplace safety
• Reactive maintenance can be cost-effective for low-impact equipment, but often increases long-term repair costs and reduces asset health for critical equipment and systems
• Many organizations blend both strategies, using preventive maintenance for high-value assets and reactive maintenance for non-critical items, to optimize maintenance budgets and asset reliability
• A good way to begin the switch from reactive to planned maintenance is to start with your top 10 most critical assets

Preventive Maintenance Defined

With a preventive maintenance approach, service occurs according to a set schedule. Regular maintenance performed before equipment failures occur helps minimize safety risks. In addition, it makes budgets more predictable, helping organizations better manage maintenance costs. Preventive maintenance improves reliability and increases uptime.

Maintenance managers can determine when to schedule preventive maintenance activities based on different factors. Some of the most common types of preventive maintenance strategies include the following:

Time-Based Maintenance

Time-based preventive maintenance tasks are scheduled according to predetermined time intervals. These asset maintenance schedules are often monthly, quarterly, or annually. Equipment with more delicate parts may call for daily inspections to ensure everything is operational.

Usage-Based Maintenance

Equipment usage hours trigger usage-based preventative maintenance tasks. Shutting everything down for a few hours after 50, 100, or 1,000 hours of operation to inspect and repair equipment can prevent several hours of unplanned downtime in the future.

Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance involves performing maintenance tasks to respond to noticeable changes in the condition or performance of assets and equipment. This type of predictive maintenance plan might share some space with reactive maintenance approaches, except it addresses potential issues before they become problematic.

Reactive Maintenance Defined

While a preventive maintenance program seeks to proactively head off potential problems, a reactive maintenance strategy addresses equipment issues as they arise. It can take various forms, depending on what triggers maintenance.

Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is the servicing of equipment issues once they’re detected, but before a total failure occurs. Compared to other reactive strategies, this approach can somewhat limit asset and machine downtime, but it is typically less effective at reducing it than preventive or predictive maintenance strategies.

Run-to-Failure (RTF) Maintenance

The RTF reactive maintenance approach carries a higher risk than other reactive maintenance strategies. With this method, teams allow equipment to operate fully until it fails before performing any corrective maintenance tasks or repairs.

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency maintenance is less of a maintenance strategy and more of a reactive maintenance response to critical failures that pose an immediate threat to safety, operations, or property. Even with the most effective preventive maintenance plans and predictive maintenance tools, issues still occur, and emergency maintenance is necessary.

Preventive vs Reactive: Key Differences

See how preventive and reactive approaches compare side-by-side with this table.

	Reactive Maintenance	Preventive Maintenance
Trigger	Failures	Routine schedule
Predictability	Low	Moderate-High
Associated Downtime Risk	High	Moderate-Low
Budget Impact	Unpredictable	Predictable
Data/Records Needed	None	Manufacturer’s recommendations, usage hours
Vendor Coordination	As-needed, often urgent	Planned
Best-Fit Assets	Non-critical	Critical

Costs & Risks: Why Over-Relying on Reactive Gets Expensive

When not balanced with preventive maintenance, a reactive strategy can quickly get expensive for maintenance organizations. Waiting until something fails to service it often means more than simply paying maintenance costs, with a cascading impact that may also include:

• Unexpected Downtime: Reactive approaches can reduce equipment reliability, leading to frequent asset failures and lost work time.
• Rush and Emergency Premiums: Prioritizing unplanned over planned maintenance often means paying service providers more to make emergency repairs.
• Overtime: Extended downtime often forces maintenance teams, janitorial staff, and other employees to work additional hours, resulting in skyrocketing labor spend.
• Spoilage and Shrinkage: Delays in emergency repairs to refrigeration, climate control, and other critical systems can result in massive inventory losses.
• SLA Misses: Unexpected downtime can prevent you from fulfilling Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the consequences of which can range from monetary penalties to severe reputation loss.
• Safety and Compliance Exposure: Failing to inspect and service assets with enhanced safety requirements can increase the risk of accidents and potentially expose you to the consequences of non-compliance.
• Shortened Asset Life: Without preventive and predictive maintenance, assets may not last as long as they otherwise would, forcing you to spend money for replacements prematurely.
• Brand/Guest Impact: Failures that detract from the customer or guest experience can ruin satisfaction scores, decrease customer loyalty, and increase the likelihood of brand-damaging negative reviews.
• Parts Expediting: When you need parts in a hurry to restore asset health and end downtime, you often pay a premium for overnight or next-day shipping.
• Variance in Vendor Performance: As you rush to fix critical equipment, you may hire a service provider who doesn’t meet your usual standards and find yourself on the hook for more unnecessary repairs due to poor work quality.
• Energy Efficiency: Ailing equipment may become less energy efficient before it ultimately fails, adding to your utility spend.

A preventive approach can reduce maintenance costs directly by reducing the risk of failures due to aging parts and lack of service. At the same time, moving to a preventive model provides additional cost savings by mitigating the risks outlined above.

When Reactive Maintenance Might Work for You

Although there are many advantages to taking a preventive approach, reactive programs may sometimes be the better choice for some assets. When determining which strategy to employ, consider:

• Asset Criticality: When an asset isn’t essential to your daily operations, categorizing regular service as unnecessary maintenance and foregoing it can help you better focus resources where they matter most.
• Compliance Risk: Assets that don’t contribute to your overall regulatory compliance efforts may be good candidates for a reactive strategy.
• Guest Impact: Equipment and assets that don’t directly impact the guest or customer experience may not require preventive maintenance.
• Redundancy: If you have a secondary machine or system that you can bring online if the first fails, a reactive approach may simplify your maintenance operations and provide more room in your maintenance budget.
• Repair Time: An asset that can be fixed quickly, due to its simplicity and the availability of parts, may be a good candidate for reactive maintenance.
• Replacement Cost: Equipment that doesn’t cost a lot to replace if a lack of preventive maintenance shortens its lifespan may be a good choice for reactive planning.

Building a Right-Sized Preventive Maintenance Program

To begin the move toward preventive maintenance, follow these tips:

• Start With What’s Critical: Take a preventive approach to your top 10 most critical assets and gradually expand the program over time.
• Automate Dispatch: Improve efficiency by automating work order creation and dispatch based on a set of clear-cut rules.
• Take a Smart Approach to SLAs: Use assets and locations to create distinct tiers, prioritizing your most critical assets.
• Track Failures Closely: Develop a universal system to track failure information and use this data to drive continuous improvement.
• Evaluate Providers Regularly: Maintain up-to-date vendor scorecards to monitor service provider performance closely.

Key Metrics to Monitor the Shift

Performance analytics and scorecards will be vital toward gauging the success of your preventive program. Some specific metrics to monitor include:

• Percentage of preventive vs. reactive work order mix
• Mean time to repair (MTTR)
• First-time fix rate
• SLA hit rate
• Emergency callout rate
• Maintenance cost variance
• Asset lifecycle extension

Preventive vs. Reactive Maintenance in the Real World

To understand the varying impacts of preventive and reactive strategies, consider what happens when the fan motor in a grocery store cooler goes without service and fails unexpectedly. A few hours pass before the temperature levels rise enough for someone to notice, and the business incurs the following costs:

• Loss of inventory due to food spoilage
• Increased labor hours as staff throws away food and thoroughly cleans the cooler
• Emergency repair premiums to get a service provider on-site quickly
• Overnight shipping fees for the new cooler fan
• Guest disappointment over reduced stock that leads to negative online reviews
• Increased stress on the cooler compressor and seals, which shortens the unit’s overall life

With a preventive approach, the fan motor would likely undergo periodic inspections and service, such as lubrication. As a result, the maintenance team addresses issues before a breakdown occurs, eliminating the need for costly repairs and sparing the business the secondary and tertiary costs of equipment failure.

How ServiceChannel Supports the Shift

ServiceChannel supports the shift from reactive to preventive maintenance. Our software serves as a single source of truth for all your maintenance data, from asset histories to budget tracking. By providing total asset visibility, our platform helps you create maintenance schedules that minimize equipment failures. And with work order automation, you can dispatch crews automatically to keep equipment running within normal operational parameters.

To stay agile, your business needs to make key decisions about maintenance efforts quickly. ServiceChannel helps strengthen and accelerate decision-making about everything from SLA management to selecting new service providers. Plus, our maintenance software provides you with access to advanced analytics and executive dashboards to help your operations reach and continue to run at peak performance.

Ready to take the guesswork out of maintenance? ServiceChannel gives you the tools to reduce emergency repairs, extend asset life, and make more confident decisions, all from a single platform.

Preventive Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance FAQs

Explore the differences between reactive approaches and preventive maintenance strategies by reading the answers to these frequently asked questions.