To ensure that machines, equipment, and commercial buildings in companies operate efficiently, it’s essential to avoid the „firefighting” approach – reacting only when something breaks down. This focus on building preventive maintenance is key to success.
That’s the essence of what’s called reactive maintenance (RM) – fixing things after they’ve already failed. The problem is that this approach often leads to chaos: unplanned downtime, costly repairs, and less effective fixes for facility managers and their maintenance team.
A smarter and more strategic way is to focus on prevention. That’s exactly what preventive maintenance plan is all about.
While reactive maintenance might appear to offer lower upfront costs because it postpones planning and scheduled intervention, this strategy results in substantial long-term financial and technical risks. The primary disadvantages of relying on RM (which often leads to expensive corrective maintenance) are unplanned downtime, increased repair costs, and a heightened risk of unforeseen operational disruptions.
When mission-critical equipment fails – be it an HVAC system or a control system – the resulting operational stop incurs maintenance costs far exceeding the immediate repair bill. This includes lost productivity, expedited shipping fees for emergency repairs and often, expensive overtime labour rates. Data unequivocally demonstrates the economic flaw in this approach.
By transitioning to systematic preventive maintenance programs (PM), organizations can achieve significant cost avoidance. According to the Federal Energy Management Program, companies save between 12% and 18% by choosing preventive maintenance over reactive maintenance, as every pound spent on preventive maintenance avoids five pounds in future costs.
This validates PM not as an overhead burden, but as a critical value driver based on systematic risk mitigation.
The fundamental objective of modern asset management is to embrace a proactive strategy. This preemptive methodology aims to prevent critical equipment failures before they manifest.
A great example is our work for a client in the oil and gas industry who needed to modernise an existing DC-DC converter module used in subsea power systems, which required specialist Multilayer PCB Design expertise. You can read more about it here.
By systematically conducting routine inspections, servicing, and condition monitoring, organizations realize the tangible preventive maintenance benefits: identifying potential issues in advance, allowing intervention before they escalate into costly failures. This improves equipment reliability.
The successful transition from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance is more than a change in scheduling – it represents a deliberate shift in operational methodology.
RM forces premium spending on unscheduled labour and emergency procurement often leading to emergency repairs. Conversely, proactive maintenance systematically smooths out labour demand and enables planned, bulk purchasing of spare parts, transforming a system reliant on costly immediate action into one defined by scheduled efficiency.
The most important phase involves engineering the technical execution of the preventive maintenance program. To effectively manage this, the right preventive maintenance software is essential. What does that mean?
We sometimes modernise existing systems, and at other times we perform reverse engineering. One notable example is a successful project for a leading oil&gas client who needed a modernised power transformer for a Subsea Electronics Module (SEM). See more here.
It’s worth remembering that a successful PM program must first determine the assets that require the most rigorous attention, especially those considered critical components.
This process begins with a comprehensive asset register and a criticality ranking, typically achieved through Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). FMEA systematically identifies potential failure modes within a system, determining their effects, causes, and the criticality of the resulting damage to overall equipment performance.
The comprehensive asset register tracks every component, including its specifications, maintenance history, and estimated lifespan. This mapping is essential for determining which assets are low-priority (suitable for RM), which require rigid time-based maintenance tasks, and which demand advanced condition monitoring (Predictive Maintenance, PdM).
The preventative maintenance strategy relies on tailored scheduling protocols, avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach. This is fundamental to effective maintenance operations.
Scheduling is generally categorized into three mechanisms, which are key types of preventive maintenance:
This entire digital workflow can be managed efficiently through our comprehensive Software Services.
This chart visually confirms the fundamental goal of proactive maintenance: to shift the intervention point from the expensive and disruptive „Failure Time” (Reactive Maintenance) to the precise „Threshold Time” (Condition-based Maintenance).
By leveraging real-time data, organizations ensure maintenance occurs only when absolutely necessary to prevent a breakdown, avoiding the premature intervention typical of Time-Based Maintenance (TBM) and the catastrophic costs of Reactive Maintenance (RM).
Operationalising a PM strategy requires converting physical conditions and service efficacy into quantifiable data. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential not only for demonstrating ROI but also for driving the continuous improvement cycle mandated by ISO 55000, ensuring optimal performance.
It’s important to understand the duality of these metrics: MTBF measures intrinsic asset reliability, while MTTR measures organizational maintainability. Maximising both simultaneously requires a structured digital system that not only schedules PM (increasing MTBF) but also streamlines the repair process (reducing MTTR through efficient work order and spare parts management).
While time- and usage-based preventive maintenance provides strong baseline reliability, it remains fundamentally inexact, often leading to unnecessary intervention or undetected weaknesses. To achieve true operational excellence, organizations must transition to Predictive Maintenance (PdM) powered by Industrial IoT (IIoT) and advanced data analytics.
Preventive maintenance is scheduled far in advance, based on estimations of asset life. Predictive Maintenance, however, uses real-time condition monitoring to anticipate equipment failures, scheduling maintenance tasks precisely when and where they are required. The foundation of maintenance protocols shifts from rigid calendars to live asset condition data.
PdM relies on a sophisticated Industrial IoT network architecture, leveraging specialized hardware and data processing capabilities. For effective building preventive maintenance, this is becoming the new standard.
InTechHouse’s R&D expertise in electronics and embedded systems is essential for architecting this infrastructure.
The architecture comprises four critical stages:
