NonStop Reliability

Reactive Maintenance Vs Proactive Maintenance

2 Min Read

What Is Reactive And Proactive Maintenance?

Proactive maintenance, also known as planned maintenance or preventive maintenance, is a maintenance strategy that involves performing regularly scheduled maintenance in order to prevent equipment failure. Planned maintenance allows you to extend the life of your equipment and reduce the amount of equipment downtime.

The other of the two maintenance strategies is called reactive maintenance (or breakdown maintenance), which involves performing maintenance after the equipment breaks down. Reactive maintenance restores the equipment to the way it was operating before it broke down. Because of the high cost of reactive maintenance, it should only be employed on inexpensive parts that can be easily replaced.

What Are The Disadvantages Of Breakdown Maintenance?

One of the disadvantages of reactive maintenance is that the cost of maintenance is much higher when you allow minor damage to become major damage. The cost of maintenance is also raised by increased equipment downtime due to equipment failure.

The biggest of the reactive maintenance disadvantages is that any necessary maintenance is performed on an emergency basis rather than during scheduled equipment downtime. If reactive maintenance is performed only when the parts absolutely need maintenance, the pressure to get the parts to work again can cause safety issues. When the parts break down and the equipment no longer works, this can also cause a safety issue for the workers.

Another one of the disadvantages of reactive maintenance includes the fact that assets have shortened life expectancies when they don’t undergo regular maintenance. With shorter life expectancies, suboptimal performance, safety issues, and increased cost of maintenance, a reactive maintenance program is the most expensive maintenance strategy for an organization.

How CMMS Software Can Help Reactive Maintenance Programs

Predictive maintenance improves upon reactive maintenance by using data and algorithms to predict when maintenance needs to be performed. Whereas reactive maintenance waits until after the machine breaks down, predictive maintenance can predict which machines are in need of maintenance due to how their work performance is affected.

By implementing a CMMS software such as IBM Maximo, your organization will be able to analyze maintenance activities so that each machine is undergoing maintenance work when it needs it, rather than you having to schedule it manually. This not only lowers the cost of maintenance, but it also reduces the amount of reactive maintenance that you have to perform.

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