Preventive Maintenance vs Breakdown Maintenance What’s the Difference

The strategy of maintenance defines uptime, safety and cost throughout every facility. There are two general competing ways of thinking: proactive care (planned, preventative maintenance) and reactive repair after failure (breakdown maintenance). This article explains the difference, demonstrates how to measure and compare outcomes, and discusses how a modern CMMS system like (Makula CMMS) can help you achieve all of the preventive care benefits without incurring outsize costs.

What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM) is maintenance that is regularly performed on a piece of equipment to lessen the likelihood of it failing. PM tasks are scheduled by time (e.g., monthly), usage (running hours) or condition based triggers and consist of regular inspections, lubrication, parts with defined life replaced and calibration.

PM is to decrease unscheduled downtime, improve safety and extend equipment life. According to studies, the shift to proactive strategies from reactive methods result in substantial reductions of maintenance costs and improvements of reliability.

Examples: filter changes at intervals, conveyor belt inspection every month, replace belts each X operating hours.

What is Breakdown Maintenance?

With breakdown maintenance, also known as reactive maintenance, you’re repairing equipment only when it’s broken down. It’s simple: If it works, leave it alone; when it breaks, repair or replace.

This kind of defense might be justified for non-critical, cheap assets in which the cost of attempting to prevent failures is more than the on-occasion impact that such failures may have. Yet depending on reactive maintenance will result in more unanticipated downtime, emergency repair costs and safety-related incidents.

Specific Examples: replacing a failed motor, repairing a pump after it has stopped, being reactive and not proactive with electrical repairs.

Why preventive maintenance always pays off

Studies and anecdotal evidence from industry consistently demonstrate that preventive (and predictive) programs lower downtime, reduce defects, and enhance reliability. “For instance, studies claim that maintenance costs can be cut by as much as ~30 percent with the move to preventive techniques; other industry statistics state that plants that practice predictive/preventive strategies have more than 50 percent less downtime than reactive-only facilities. The worldwide consequences of poor or insufficient maintenance are also significant—research indicates there are hundreds of billions lost annually through maintenance-caused downtime and failures.

How to measure reactive vs preventative maintenance

The KPIs You should know what fields need to be monitored and build that feature in.

Compare to track a few core KPIs if you just want to see what works. A CMMS makes this straightforward.

Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP) — the proportion of time maintenance hours are planned for in advance compared to unplanned. The greater the PMP, the more proactive people work. Industry guidelines recommend aiming for at least 3-sigma (50%) under best case conditions and >90% for world-class reliability.

MTBF — average time between failures, better if higher.

Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) — the length of time on average it takes to repair a failed component; shorter is better. Monitor Responsiveness and Repair Efficiency with MTTR.

Schedule Compliance — the percentage of scheduled work performed on schedule. High (>90% target) on time schedule adherence helps retain the PM effectiveness.

Reactive Work by Asset — percentage of reactive work associated with each machine; high numbers indicate candidates for PM or replacement.

By monitoring these KPIs, you can address this question: “How do you measure reactive maintenance vs preventive maintenance?” — by tracking average values of PMP, MTBF, MTTR and PMC over time.

Practical guide to decision

Apply preventive maintenance toward assets that are essential to production, incurring high opportunity costs of downtime, have safety and compliance on the line or else are expensive to replace.

Use Breakdown Maintenance when: the assets’ costs are low, spare parts are easy to replace and cheap to buy, and downtime does not cause significant negative impact on business.

Hybrid model: Most plants do best to employ a combination of the two—e.g., PdM for mission-critical equipment; selective reactive for low-risk gear—and use data to move poorly-performing assets from reactive maintenance to planned care.

How a CMMS changes the game

A CMMS is the central control system for a maintenance program. Common features of a good CMMS are: Asset Register, Automated PM scheduling with mobile devices dispatched to work orders Inventory & Spare Parts Management Technician Dispatch Dashboards for PMP MTTR MTBF Schedule Compliance Software allows data to be centralized, turning PM from “calendar chores” into reliable work that’s targeted and measurable.

Real impact: CMMS-enabled PM increases planned work, reduces emergency repair, and provides the analysis to demonstrate ROI back to the operations and finance teams.

How Makula CMMS helps you in getting preventive maintenance right

Makula CMMS designed for teams be it small or big looking to implement professional grade PM tools but do not want to deal with enterprise level complexity and costs. Value triggers for your Learning Centre piece:

Automated PM scheduling: Generate calendar-, usage- or condition-based PMs in minutes and Makula will automatically trigger work orders for them.

Tech workflows for mobile-first philosophy: Field techs can accept, log and close work-orders on mobile – eliminating paper processing so that schedule is more closely followed.Completed tickets are closed from the field as well.

Inventory & spares tracking: Monitor essential components, define reorder limits and cut downtime due to absence of spare parts.

Built-in KPI dashboards: (PMP, MTTR, MTBF, schedule compliance and reactive vs planned) reports to help managers measure improvements, and illustrate the impact on costs.

Adaptable pricing levels: Made for small- and mid-sized operations that are interested in reliability tools without the big CAPEX, predictable per-user/per-asset plans, rapid implementation. (Feature particulars and pricing should point to your product/pricing page for real-time accuracy.)

Positioning note: Describe Makula as the PM capabilities companies need (automation, mobile, reporting) at a SMB price point. They will be able to get preventive benefits quickly without paying for too long of a payback period.

Maintenance factors to optimize PM ROI

1. Begin with critical asset mapping: concentrate PM effort where failure is most expensive.
2. Track and enhance PMP and schedule compliance first- small victories matter.
3. Leverage spare-parts optimization to minimize MTTR when things do go wrong.
4. Conduct root-cause analysis on recurring failures—if PM tasks are not addressing the problem, modify them.
5. Introduce more condition based triggers (vibration, oil analysis) to transition away from time based PM to smart condition based activities.