Reactive Maintenance: Meaning, Examples, Pros & Cons

Reactive maintenance is the practice of holding off maintenance activities until a failure occurs. If you manage equipment in your role at your organization, you’ve likely seen it in action. A critical asset suffers a sudden equipment failure, leaving your team scrambling to get it back up and running.

When used as the sole maintenance strategy, a reactive approach can lead to increased maintenance spend, lost productivity, ineffective asset management, poor asset performance, and other challenges. That doesn’t mean that there’s no place for reactive maintenance. On the contrary, reactive maintenance can be an effective strategy when managed correctly and deployed strategically.

This guide serves as an introduction to reactive maintenance for maintenance professionals. By the end, you’ll have an in-depth understanding of reactive maintenance: when to use it, its limitations, and how to integrate it with other maintenance strategies, such as predictive maintenance.

What Is Reactive Maintenance?

Reactive maintenance involves repairing or replacing equipment only once it has malfunctioned or broken down. Reactive maintenance approaches create workflows with very short lifecycles. Here is a simple example of reactive maintenance steps:

1. Unexpected failure
2. Diagnosis of cause of failure
3. Dispatch of maintenance team
4. Asset repair

While it is unwise to rely solely on reactive maintenance vs. preventive maintenance, your facility should also have a solid reactive maintenance strategy so that you can efficiently perform emergency repairs as needed. Some advantages of reactive maintenance include low upfront investment, simplified planning, no need for ongoing metric monitoring, and reduced staffing requirements.

There are several types of reactive maintenance, including the following:

Run-to-Failure Maintenance

Run-to-failure maintenance involves allowing equipment to operate until it breaks down. Repairs or replacements are made only after equipment malfunctions. This approach is typically used alongside predictive maintenance to pinpoint when failure is imminent.

Unplanned Maintenance

Unplanned maintenance happens when unexpected equipment issues arise that were not previously scheduled. These issues may not be an equipment failure. They may simply cause the asset to underperform or be signs of future equipment failures if not immediately addressed.

Breakdown Maintenance

Breakdown maintenance is similar to unplanned maintenance, but it differs slightly. This type of reactive maintenance only happens after equipment failures. However, it may or may not be an emergency maintenance situation.

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency maintenance is the most urgent form of reactive maintenance. It is performed when critical equipment experiences a failure that threatens safety, production, major operational functions, or property damage. Generally, emergency maintenance tasks must be performed immediately upon detection.

When Reactive Maintenance Makes Sense

Reactive maintenance can make sense under a few circumstances. Generally, a reactive maintenance plan can be a suitable solution for:

• Non-Critical Assets: A reactive strategy might be a good fit if you can afford to wait for repairs.
• Assets With Low Initial Costs: When the cost of replacement is low and maintenance expenses are high, a reactive plan may be a more fiscally sound choice compared to a scheduled maintenance program.
• Early-Stage Assets: Newly acquired assets will usually lack a solid history of maintenance tasks completed, making it difficult to employ proactive maintenance strategies.
• Low Safety Risk Assets: Reactive maintenance can be acceptable for assets that don’t pose safety risks with a lack of routine inspections.
• Assets With Unpredictable Failure History: Data analytics can often leverage failure history to spot signs of imminent failure, enabling a predictive maintenance strategy. When data analytics fail to identify signs of imminent failure, a predictive maintenance approach may become impossible, leaving a reactive plan as the best option.

Non-critical signage, light bulbs in back-of-house lighting, and low-risk décor are a few examples of assets that may be well-suited to a reactive approach.

Risks and Hidden Costs of Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance can significantly impact many areas of your operations. Some of the major disadvantages of reactive maintenance include:

• Unexpected Downtime: When equipment breaks, you have to wait for repairs, which results in lost production time and associated revenue.
• Rush and Emergency Premiums: Service providers may charge expensive fees for rush jobs or emergency service, straining your maintenance budget more than regularly scheduled routine maintenance would.
• Overtime: To make necessary repairs, technicians and support staff may need to put in extra hours, greatly increasing labor spend.
• Spoilage and Shrinkage: Equipment failures can result in costly inventory losses.
• SLA Misses: Service Level Agreements may be breached when systems remain offline for too long or repairs are delayed, triggering penalties or reputational damage.
• Safety and Compliance Exposure: Faulty equipment could pose a danger to your employees and customers and put you at risk of compliance issues and accidents.
• Shortened Asset Life: A lack of planned maintenance can undermine your asset management efforts, leading to premature equipment failure.
• Brand/Guest Impact: Reactive maintenance strategies that lead to lengthy asset downtime can damage your brand reputation and customer satisfaction.
• Parts Expediting: When you don’t have the necessary parts in stock, expediting them can result in higher costs.
• Variance in Vendor Performance: Rushed, last-minute vendor selection may lead to inconsistent quality or inflated pricing.
• Energy efficiency: Poor performance from failing equipment can lead to higher energy use, increasing your utility spend.

Reactive vs. Preventive vs. Proactive Maintenance

Check out this table to see how reactive, preventive, and proactive maintenance approaches differ.

	Reactive Maintenance	Preventive Maintenance	Proactive Maintenance
Trigger	Equipment failure	Scheduled by time or usage hours	Condition data alerts
Predictability	Unpredictable	Moderate	Highly predictable
Downtimerisk	High	Moderate	Low
Data needs	Minimal	Moderate	High
Budget impact	Low initial costs, high in long term	Moderate initial and long term	High initial costs, low in long-term
Best-fit assets	Low-criticality	Regularly used assets	High value, complex systems

Real-World Example of the Cost of Reactive Maintenance Activities

Reactive maintenance can be extremely costly because it delays service until a breakdown occurs. In fact, its costs often cascade. Imagine, for instance, that on an extremely hot day, a hotel’s HVAC system unexpectedly malfunctions.

Without immediate attention, it quickly becomes uncomfortably hot, prompting guest complaints and refund requests. You have a long line of dissatisfied guests at the front desk and constant phone calls to answer. As a result, your afternoon staff works overtime, increasing your labor spend.

Meanwhile, your HVAC repair provider charges double for emergency service to address unexpected problems. The faulty parts must be rush-ordered, leading to a 50% fee.

After repairs are complete, the increased costs to your business continue, as guests leave poor online reviews you must address, and the wear and tear caused by the failure has shortened the asset’s life, meaning it will need to be replaced sooner than anticipated. A combination of preventive and predictive maintenance could have eliminated the expensive repairs and other short- and long-term costs.

How to Reduce Reactive Work Without Overspending

To begin the shift from a reactive strategy to more proactive approaches while keeping your maintenance operations cost-effective, follow these tips:

• Create an Asset Criticality Matrix: Rank equipment based on safety, operations, and spend. Then, focus your preventive and predictive maintenance activities on the top 10 most critical assets.
• Standardize Dispatch Rules: Develop a clear set of rules for assigning work orders to better control resources and direct them to the most critical assets.
• Define SLA Tiers by Asset/Location: Establish distinct tiers to ensure critical sites receive rapid response and that low-impact work doesn’t delay it.
• Monitor Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and First-Time-Fix Rates: Closely tracking these KPIs can help you spot inefficiencies in workflows, skill gaps, and other issues that are slowing you down.
• Assign and Capture Failure Codes: A universal coding system enables you to collect the data needed to support a more predictive approach.
• Use Provider Scorecards: Hold providers accountable and ensure compliance with your preventive and predictive maintenance programs with detailed scorecards.
• Configure Alert Thresholds and Call-Avoidance Workflows: Prevent minor issues, such as a burned-out light bulb, or non-critical repairs, like a dead battery in a seldom-used asset, from taking priority over more critical repairs.

How ServiceChannel Helps

The best approach for most facilities is to balance regular preventive maintenance with reactive maintenance activities. This combined strategy helps extend asset lifespans by catching issues early without overcommitting resources to unnecessary repairs. ServiceChannel can help your organization achieve that balance.

Our platform gives you total asset visibility to support proactive maintenance efforts and provides more control over maintenance operations through automated work orders, SLA management, budget tracking, compliance documentation, and more. Plus, our vendor marketplace helps you find providers in new markets, keeping your organization agile and ready to grow. With our performance analytics and executive dashboards, you can gain key insights and identify new opportunities to support the peak performance of every asset. 

Book a demo today to learn more.

Reactive Maintenance FAQs

Learn more about reactive maintenance by checking out the answers to these frequently asked questions.