Reactive Maintenance
Reactive Maintenance – what is it?
This maintenance strategy is also known as breakdown maintenance strategy, where you fix the equipment when it breaks. This means that the maintenance is only performed once the issue is identified.
Maintenance departments may be under the wrong impression that Reactive Maintenance is the easiest approach. This is because there is no initial cost, and it requires lower staffing and less planning than planned maintenance.
However, once the breakdown occurs to critical equipment, it tends to catch you unaware and you get overtime and extensive repair costs. Or maybe you will experience a long delivery time on necessary spare parts, which in the worst case scenario can stop your entire production – or parts of it.
Reactive Maintenance as a strategy
This strategy is ideal for small companies or for maintenance jobs on less critical equipment where breakdown do not cause collateral damage.
This maintenance strategy can be a part of your maintenance strategy because all equipment failure cannot be planned or predicted. However, you should not exclusively rely on the strategy and if zero downtime is important, you should consider another strategy.
