Comparing Proactive Maintenance vs Reactive Maintenance: Moving into the Future

For years, reactive maintenance was the dominant maintenance strategy for many organizations. This simple approach delays maintenance until a piece of equipment breaks, resulting in costly emergency repairs by a service provider. The cycle then continues with maintenance managers playing the role of firefighter, devoting most of their energy and resources to managing the effects of equipment breakdowns and their resulting downtime.

The rise of machine learning now makes it possible for organizations to take a more proactive approach to maintenance tasks to reduce downtime and enable maintenance managers to prioritize strategy, asset management, and other responsibilities. In this guide, you’ll have a chance to explore the differences between proactive and reactive maintenance, find out when reactive approaches may still make sense, and learn how you can begin to move your maintenance operations to a more proactive approach.

What Does Reactive Maintenance Mean? 

Reactive maintenance is when maintenance activities occur after an equipment failure. The incident leads to the creation of a work request and an initial assessment. Unless only a minor repair is required, a service provider must usually be dispatched to perform the work, resulting in delays and extended downtime. After the repair is complete, the asset returns to service, and no additional maintenance will be performed until another disruption to normal operation occurs.

When discussing reactive approaches, you may encounter some related terms, including:

• Breakdown Maintenance: With this approach, maintenance waits until a full breakdown occurs.
• Run-to-Failure (RTF) Maintenance: This strategy is when maintenance activities wait until equipment experiences any type of failure, such as a breakdown, safety failure, or noticeable loss in operational efficiency.
• Corrective Maintenance: This term describes repairs made to return an asset to normal operation following a failure.

What Does Proactive Maintenance Mean? 

Proactive maintenance is planned maintenance that enhances the usable life of assets, equipment, and your company’s infrastructure. This type of maintenance includes routine inspections. cleaning, repairs, replacements, adjustments, and lubrication. In essence, proactive maintenance addresses the small problems before they become larger ones, resulting in fewer breakdowns and lower repair expenses.

Multiple sources inform a proactive maintenance plan, including:

• Preventive Maintenance Recommendations: Guidelines from manufacturers help determine when routine tasks occur.
• Real-Time Data: Sensors enable teams to monitor the state of equipment, making it possible to perform condition-based maintenance when assets show early warning signs of failure.
• Historical Data: Machine learning algorithms analyze historical asset performance data to predict future failures. You will sometimes see this referred to as predictive maintenance.

Proactive vs Reactive: Key Differences

For a quick side-by-side overview of how reactive and proactive maintenance strategies compare, study this table.

	Reactive Maintenance	Proactive Maintenance
Trigger	Failures	Condition data alerts
Predictability	Low	High
Associated Downtime Risk	High	Low
Budget Impact	Upfront cost savings, more costly over time	High upfront spend, more cost-effective over time
Data/Records Needs	Minimal	Robust
Vendor Coordination	As-needed, often urgent	Planned
Best-Fit Assets	Non-critical	Critical

Costs & Risks: Why Staying Reactive Is Less Cost-Effective

Reactive maintenance strategies go beyond making costly repairs when something breaks. Putting off maintenance activities until problems occur can have a ripple effect across many aspects of your business, outside traditional maintenance costs. Some risks and costs of staying reactive include:

• Unexpected Downtime: Unexpected failures reduce operational efficiency. Depending on your industry, equipment failures may mean lost production time, location closures, and more.
• Rush and Emergency Premiums: Service providers often charge more for rush and emergency repairs, making it more expensive to bring unplanned downtime to a quick end when machine failures occur.
• Overtime: Extended downtime can mean your maintenance team, janitorial staff, and other employees must work additional hours, increasing labor spend.
• Spoilage and Shrinkage: When critical assets like refrigerators and HVAC systems break down, the impact on perishable and weather-sensitive inventory can be considerable.
• SLA Misses: If unplanned downtime prevents you from living up to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), you may face serious reputational harm or even monetary penalties.
• Safety and Compliance Exposure: Taking a wait-until-failure approach can lead to overlooking serious safety risks, leaving you vulnerable to liability and penalties for non-compliance with health and safety standards.
• Shortened Asset Life: A lack of preventive and proactive maintenance can dramatically shorten asset lifespans due to excessive wear and tear. In addition to lessening the life of your assets, failing parts can negatively impact asset performance and asset health.
• Brand/Guest Impact: By not taking steps to minimize downtime, you risk disappointing customers or guests with service interruptions and increasing the likelihood of negative reviews that can harm your reputation over the long term.
• Parts Expediting: Overnight and next-day shipping can greatly increase the cost of parts needed to do emergency maintenance.
• Variance in Vendor Performance: When your most critical assets fail, your need to get them up and running quickly can lead you to relax your standards or skip due diligence entirely, landing you with a service provider who performs substandard work.
• Energy Efficiency: A breakdown maintenance approach can cause you to overlook issues that make equipment less energy efficient, leading to waste and complicating progress toward your sustainability goals

Proactive Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance Example

To see the impact of reactive vs. proactive maintenance strategies, consider how costs quickly cascade in this real-world example. In a large shopping mall, the air conditioner in an entire wing suddenly shuts off in the middle of the afternoon on a sweltering hot summer day, leading to the following consequences:

• Expensive emergency call from an HVAC technician
• Ice melt from the shutdown air conditioner leaks through ceiling tiles and electrical conduit, leading to the need for more repairs
• Reduced foot traffic in the mall causes tenant dissatisfaction
• Uncomfortable conditions damage the mall’s reputation with shoppers
• Janitorial staff work overtime to clean up the leaks
• The necessary blower motor for repairing the system requires a rush order shipping fee
• Management rents cooling towers to keep conditions comfortable for shoppers, resulting in unnecessary expenses

Proactive maintenance tasks would likely have caught many underlying issues that led to blower motor failures. For example, technicians might clean and replace blower filters as part of preventive maintenance, or sensors might detect vibrational changes that indicate a loose fan belt. As a result, a proactive strategy may have prevented the above scenario from ever happening.

When Reactive Is Acceptable (and When It Isn’t)

When deciding where in your maintenance program to take a reactive approach, consider the following:

• Asset Criticality: Save reactive methods for assets that aren’t vital to daily operations.
• Compliance Risk: Support workplace safety by implementing preventive and predictive maintenance for assets that pose significant risks.
• Guest Impact: Assets that won’t impact your customer or guest satisfaction levels may be good candidates for run-to-failure maintenance plans.
• Redundancy: If you have more than one asset available to perform a task, you might use a more reactive strategy.
• Time to Repair: Assets that are quick, easy, and inexpensive to fix may be good candidates for a reactive strategy.
• Replacement Costs: Because a lack of routine maintenance can shorten equipment life, choose predictive and preventive maintenance for assets with high replacement costs.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive: A Practical Playbook

To move your maintenance program in a more proactive direction, follow these tips:

• Prioritize What’s Critical: Deploy resources strategically by shifting your 10 top assets to proactive maintenance first.
• Create Preventive Maintenance Schedules: Ensure that routine inspections and repairs occur according to the manufacturer’s recommendations.
• Standardize Dispatch Rules: Use clear-cut rules to automate dispatch and ensure your most important assets receive top priority.
• Establish SLA Tiers: Create distinct tiers based on asset criticality and location to improve response times.
• Record Failure Codes: Adopting a standardized system of failure codes will help algorithms anticipate problems more effectively.
• Review Service Provider Performance: Monitor service provider performance closely with standardized scorecards.

Metrics That Prove the Shift

As you strive to strike a better balance between proactive and reactive maintenance, track these metrics monthly to monitor your progress:

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

How ServiceChannel Supports a Proactive Maintenance Culture

A maintenance team that lives by reactive maintenance constantly needs to put out fires, making it seem impossible to ever get ahead. With proactive maintenance, you can make data-backed decisions and find issues that could cause a disruption in production to address them before something occurs.

ServiceChannel can support your team’s shift to a more proactive maintenance strategy while continuing to prioritize reactive and preventive maintenance with those assets that make sense. Our CMMS brings total asset visibility to your maintenance program and rolls work order automation, performance analytics, SLA management, budget tracking, compliance documentation, and more into one convenient system. Functioning as the sole source of truth for everything from asset performance to energy utilization, our platform keeps everyone on the same page as you plan maintenance activities and develop your proactive strategy.

With machine learning models, our platform can predict when failures are most likely to occur, cutting down on unplanned repairs and helping all your assets run at peak performance. Our data analytics tools and dashboards also help you make informed decisions quickly, giving you the agility needed to shift priorities and resources in response to unpredictable industry changes. See for yourself how ServiceChannel can help you foster a more proactive approach to maintenance management. 

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Proactive Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance FAQs

Learn more about proactive maintenance by reviewing the answers to these frequently asked questions.