Several factors can come into play when there is need to choose a fertile option between reactive and preventative maintenance for maintenance of your business assets and equipment. Since both approaches are employed by business organizations and companies to keep up their business assets and tools in best working condition, they both have positives and negatives that you should consider before moving ahead with any of them.

What is preventive maintenance?

It is a business assets maintenance approach that involves periodic or scheduled inspection of business assets, equipment, tools, machines and their parts even when they are operational at workplace or plant. Basically, preventive maintenance is a routine maintenance to keep business equipment up and running to prevent unexpected and expensive downtimes.

Facility managers inspect business tools and machines periodically during the preventive maintenance before there is breakdown or equipment failure.

Reactive maintenance.

Whether your facility managers are comfortable with preventive or reactive maintenance, you must have a glance at pros and cons of each maintenance approach in order to determine which one is suitable according to your business needs and what benefits it can offer to your facility managers in results.

Below I am about to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of preventive maintenance to help you understand why it is the best choice for you and what side effects it can have for your business or company.

Pros of preventive maintenance.

Reduced risk factor.

During the preventive maintenance, business assets and tools are inspected and checked on regular basis (according to a maintenance schedule) that enables a business or company to experience reduced risks of unexpected breakdowns and a safer workplace environment for employees to complete their tasks efficiently.

Longer equipment life.

When all business assets and tools are being checked according to a pre-planned maintenance schedule, almost all business assets would be in good working condition with a longer lifetime. Since poorly performing parts are also changed during this maintenance approach, every equipment or asset can perform more productively than ever.

Flexible maintenance schedule.

As its name shows that it is the preventive maintenance to prevent unforeseen downtimes and failures. Every business follows a flexible maintenance schedule to let the management know when the equipment will be down for maintenance.

Management and employees should be used-to and up-to-date on replacement orders to keep the business operations running smoothly.  In this way, a business can enjoy increased productivity without facing the issues of equipment breakdown and failure -- with the resulting time delay waste.

Reduced costs.

When you are taking care of your business assets by using the preventive maintenance system you will see that the business is bearing reduced costs in terms of less breakdown and a fewer expensive repairing costs. In this way, you can also replace a business tool or machine at the right time instead of spending a lot of money in its repairing or maintenance.

Use of the maintenance management software can help you keep up with preventive maintenance schedules by providing the all essential equipment details and breakdown history in real time.

Less consumption of energy and resources.

When a businesses asset or equipment is not maintained well, it is more likely to consume more energy (fuel or electricity) than normal condition. When you are keeping up your business tools are assets with preventive maintenance, the issue can be identified quickly to save energy and other business resources for well-being of the business. The more business energy you will save, the higher of business profits would be.

Fewer disruptions.

Due to the regular inspection and maintenance of business tools and assets, the chances of disruption are always fewer. By having a maintenance schedule on hand, you will have better information about when to close down the machine or equipment for maintenance without having an impact on business productivity and efficiency.

Did you know that hotels even have an exact maintenance schedule for their mattresses? If you are a business owner -- pull up those sheets and check it out. It's marked in black marker on the corners. The mattresses are turned an exact direction every week -- with a resultant time and equipment savings of millions across the industry. That is what a scheduled maintenance can do for you. Your equipment is much more expensive than a mattress.

Cons of preventive maintenance.

You may need more budgets to get started.

Initial implementation costs of CMMS for preventive maintenance can definitely be higher for small businesses or even unbearable if there is limited business budget for asset management and maintenance.

As it is the process of inspecting and checking assets for maintenance regularly, you may need to invest in latest tools and equipment to carry out the maintenance jobs accordingly that will definitely increase the overall business costs.

More resources required.

As you are following a maintenance schedule, there will be need of more resources in terms of manpower, parts and finances to perform preventive maintenance. On another hand, you may need to call a mechanic for a onetime fix when relying on reactive maintenance.

Over maintenance.

By having a regular maintenance plan on hand, you have to check and inspect business assets that may not need to be checked as they are working properly without creating troubles. In this way, you are spending more business resources and money on over maintenance of business assets that can be spent on other productive areas to increase the overall revenues.