The cost of PMs vs unexpected failures

The difference is timing

Reactive work starts with a failure, preventive work starts with a date. Reactive maintenance costs more per repair than preventive maintenance, and the extra cost reaches past the repair bill.

What is reactive maintenance?

Reactive maintenance (also called run-to-failure or breakdown maintenance) means you fix equipment after it breaks. There’s no scheduled inspection or servicing. You wait for the failure, then respond.

This approach feels cheaper in the short term because you’re not spending money on maintenance until something breaks. But the hidden costs are significant.

What is preventive maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM) means you service equipment on a regular schedule, before it fails. This includes inspections, lubrication, filter changes, calibration, and component replacement at manufacturer-recommended intervals.

The goal is simple: catch problems early when they’re cheap to fix, instead of waiting for catastrophic failures that are expensive to repair.

What is predictive maintenance?

Predictive maintenance services equipment when measurements show it is wearing, such as vibration, temperature, or oil condition. Reactive maintenance waits for the failure, preventive maintenance follows the calendar, and predictive maintenance follows the equipment’s measured condition.

Direct costs

A reactive repair carries these direct costs:

• Emergency labor: unplanned repairs often require overtime or emergency callouts
• Expedited parts: rush shipping for replacement parts costs significantly more
• Collateral damage: a failing bearing can damage the shaft, housing, and seals if not caught early
• Production losses: every hour of unplanned downtime costs production revenue

Indirect costs

Beyond the repair bill, reactive maintenance creates hidden costs:

• Reduced equipment lifespan: equipment that isn’t maintained wears out faster
• Safety risks: failed equipment can injure workers and create liability
• Quality issues: degraded equipment produces lower-quality output
• Team stress: constant firefighting burns out your maintenance team
• Lost knowledge: without documented procedures, repairs depend on individual expertise

How to transition to preventive maintenance

You don’t need to switch overnight. Know what you have first, then start with your most critical assets.

Start with what you have

If nobody has written down your assets, their manuals, or their service history, build those records before anything else. The steps that follow need them.

Walk the site and write down each asset with its make and model, read from the nameplate or label on the equipment. Then collect a manual for each model. Start with the manufacturer’s website. Where there isn’t one, ask the manufacturer for it, quoting the make and model.

Pull the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks from each manual and attach them to the asset they belong to. Those tasks become the calendar: one row per asset and task, with the date it is next due. Decide which tasks your team does and which go to a vendor under contract, and write that beside each row.

Before you spend anything on the program, record how each asset runs today and what has already failed. Without that record, you can’t show later what the program changed.

1. Identify critical assets. Which equipment would cause the most downtime if it failed? Which failures would be the most expensive?
2. Establish baselines. Check manufacturer recommendations for service intervals. Review your breakdown history, if you have one, to identify failure patterns. If a motor fails every 6 months, schedule inspection at 4 months.
3. Create schedules. Set up recurring maintenance schedules: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. A CMMS creates each work order before its due date.
4. Define procedures. Create standardized checklists for each maintenance task. This ensures consistent quality regardless of which technician performs the work.
5. Track compliance. Monitor your PM compliance rate, the percentage of scheduled maintenance completed on time, and find the cause of each missed task.

Where to keep them

In preventive maintenance you set any frequency and a lead time, and FixAhead creates each work order ahead of its due date.

A register already in a spreadsheet comes in through bulk import, from a CSV or Excel file, with each row checked first.

Building a preventive maintenance program walks through the set-up in FixAhead, from import to PM compliance.

Measuring the impact

After implementing preventive maintenance, track these metrics:

• Unplanned downtime: should decrease
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): should increase as equipment is maintained properly
• Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): should decrease as problems are caught earlier
• Maintenance cost per asset: may increase initially, then decrease as reactive repairs drop
• PM compliance rate: should stay high once the schedules are running

How to measure reactive against preventive maintenance

Measure reactive against preventive maintenance by recording on every work order whether it was planned or came from a failure, then comparing the two each month.

1. Mark each work order’s type. Each work order is preventive, started from a schedule, or reactive, started by a breakdown or a request. Mark emergency jobs as their own type. Without the type on the work order, no figure below can be calculated.
2. Agree the definitions in writing. Decide what counts as reactive, for example whether a fault found during a PM is a reactive job, and count it the same way each month. Two sites that count differently report different figures for the same work.
3. Calculate the planned share. Divide hours, or work orders, on preventive work by the total for the month. Use the same unit each month, and track the share over time; it should rise.
4. Calculate emergency work. Divide hours on emergency jobs by total hours worked.
5. Check that the preventive work gets done. Divide PM actions completed by PM actions scheduled. A rising planned share means little if scheduled PMs are skipped.
6. Read them together. Read the planned share beside unplanned downtime, MTBF, and maintenance cost per asset. One figure can be pushed up at the cost of the rest.

The maintenance metrics and KPIs guide gives each figure’s calculation and the records it needs.

Getting started today

The biggest barrier to preventive maintenance isn’t technology. It’s the decision to start. Pick your 10 most critical assets, set up basic PM schedules, and track compliance for 90 days. The data will make the case for expanding the program.