What Is Proactive Maintenance? (And How to Implement a Strategy)

Let’s say your most important machine broke down today due to a part failure. What would happen? Expensive repairs? Employee injuries? Unplanned downtime? The result would be a disaster.

Now, you’re scrambling to get operations up and running again, and your employee needs a medical evaluation. Customer orders may not be filled on time, and you could be looking at a personal injury lawsuit.

If you’re not consistent about inspecting and maintaining your equipment to prevent failures from happening, it’s only a matter of time before this situation happens in real life. For far too long, businesses have chosen a reactive maintenance approach after a machine failure happens. Today, several are making the switch to an oftentimes cheaper, disaster-free proactive maintenance approach and catching equipment issues ahead of time. 

But what exactly is proactive maintenance, and how can your business perform it effectively? Read on for everything you need to know.

What Is Proactive Maintenance?

Proactive maintenance is just what it sounds like — performing maintenance tasks on equipment and facilities before a breakdown or failure occurs. By taking the time to perform maintenance proactively, you can extend the lifespan of critical infrastructure and avoid costly downtime. 

For example, let’s suppose a conveyor belt is a core piece of your business systems. Rather than waiting for a belt slippage or breakdown that could cause major delays, employee safety issues and/or an expensive repair bill, you can proactively schedule maintenance activities to check on the belt’s quality and make sure no major, costly issues arise. 

Types of Proactive Maintenance

There are three types of proactive maintenance: routine maintenance, condition-based maintenance and preventive maintenance. Explore each type of maintenance to consider the right option(s) for your business.

• Routine maintenance: Routine maintenance is the process of regularly maintaining equipment and facilities to increase equipment uptime, extend the lifespan of critical infrastructure and prevent other major malfunctions from occurring. 
• Preventive maintenance: Using preventive maintenance measures involves inspecting equipment and replacing parts regularly within a scheduled time frame or after a certain amount of hours are logged using the machine.
• Condition-based maintenance: Condition-based maintenance involves regularly inspecting and monitoring equipment, typically by using Internet of Things (IoT) devices that track data in real time, to determine your asset’s condition. Using condition monitoring will help you make informed decisions about proactive maintenance required to extend your equipment’s life.

Benefits of Proactive Maintenance 

A reactive maintenance approach means you’re waiting until after expensive and dangerous equipment failures occur. This can result in production delays, employee injuries/lawsuits and potentially bankruptcy due to costly expenses. Proactive maintenance can prevent the issue from even happening. Here are some of the many benefits to being proactive about both asset and facility management:

• Decreases asset downtime: Let’s suppose you are performing routine maintenance work on a hydraulic press and notice a small oil leak. To alleviate the issue, you tighten a loose fitting and replace a worn-out seal. Problem solved. Had you ever caught that issue, it could’ve developed into a major hydraulic system failure, resulting in serious downtime and the expensive replacement of the system. 
• Reduces maintenance costs over an asset’s lifespan: Your company can save substantial funds catching and fixing small issues before they turn into major ones. Plus, you’ll extend the lifespan of a piece of equipment, stretching its value and keeping money on hand for longer before you need to replace it. 
• Increase equipment safety: Not keeping your equipment fully functional can pose serious safety hazards for members of your team. In addition to causing an employee potentially life-altering injuries, your company could be liable to pay for their medical costs and pain and suffering in a potentially multimillion-dollar lawsuit. 

Disadvantages of Proactive Maintenance

Of course, maintenance costs time and money to perform. Here are some of the challenges that come with investing in proactive maintenance processes:

• Investment in upfront costs: You will need to regularly spend money on performing maintenance and replacing spare parts. That said, spending money on maintenance upfront can save you thousands or millions in the long-run by preventing major breakdowns or employee injuries. 
• Takes time and resources to implement: You’ll need to schedule and pay maintenance technicians to regularly inspect and maintain equipment. Fortunately, CMMS software like Coast makes it simple to schedule routine maintenance and notify employees to ensure it’s organized and performed efficiently. 

How Delta’s Proactive Maintenance Approach Decreases Downtime

Traditionally, Delta Air Lines had a reactive approach to maintenance, primarily addressing issues after they caused a flight delay or cancellation. About a decade ago, the major airline developed a proactive maintenance plan for its aircraft fleet, using predictive maintenance tools and real-time data collected from thousands of aircraft sensors to drastically reduce downtime.

These sensors continuously monitor various components of each plane, including engines, hydraulics and more to detect any signs of wear or potential failure well before any of them develop into serious problems. The predictive analysis allows Delta’s maintenance team to catch issues and schedule repairs during off-peak hours or overnight to ensure that the planes are safe and ready to fly as needed. 

This proactive approach has drastically reduced the number of unexpected mechanical issues that commonly lead to flight delays, cancellations or emergency maintenance. In just eight years, the company was able to reduce the 5,600 cancellations due to maintenance in 2010 to only 55 maintenance-related cancellations by 2018.

The Benefits of Delta’s Approach

The results of Delta’s proactive maintenance approach offered the following core benefits:

• Improved on-time performance: Flights don’t need to be delayed or canceled when potential failures are caught well ahead of time. 
• Enhanced passenger satisfaction: Passengers are happy to be able to board their flights on time and not have to wait on emergency repairs.
• Reduced maintenance costs: Fixing a small part of an engine is way cheaper than replacing a major component or the engine altogether.

Delta’s overall operations are substantially smoother and more reliable catching issues before they arise. Needless to say, this approach has given them a serious competitive advantage over airlines that continue to use reactive maintenance.

How to Use a CMMS for Proactive Maintenance

A CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) like Coast is a core component of implementing an effective proactive maintenance strategy. Here are the key steps to leveraging the best equipment maintenance software to effectively care for your organization’s equipment and facilities:

1. Start with your largest assets: Consider the most critical assets in your operations. This is the infrastructure that should be prioritized for recurring proactive maintenance. 
2. Determine maintenance task frequency: Leverage the manufacturer’s guidelines, historical data and maintenance experts to dictate which tasks are most important to protect key assets and prevent failures and how often these tasks need to be routinely scheduled.
3. Create a proactive maintenance calendar: Build a maintenance schedule for months in advance to ensure a well-organized routine and balanced workload for maintenance staff.
4. Use a CMMS to assign tasks and communicate with technicians: For effective scheduling and communications, you can use Coast for work order management to automatically schedule maintenance workers and provide them with the necessary materials to inspect and maintain equipment. 
5. Track and analyze performance: Once proactive maintenance is complete, the relevant worker can mark the task as complete in the app and fill out relevant reports about the equipment’s status and if there are any signs of potential issues.

This maintenance data can be used to analyze trends, schedule preventive maintenance when an issue with a part is discovered and refine your overall maintenance program for maximum efficiency.

Get Started With Coast

By following these simple steps, you’re on your way to streamlining maintenance procedures and ensuring the continuity of operations across business systems. 

Don’t wait to switch from a reactive to proactive approach to maintenance. Get signed up for Coast for free today to get started!