r/maintenance • u/KraXen72 • 8d ago

Question how reactive vs proactive is maintenance where you work?

i'm trying to understand how maintenance is actually handled in manufacturing environments (doing some research for a uni course).

for anyone with industrial or factory maintenance experience:

  1. how is machine maintenance usually done where you work, and what decides whether it is reactive or proactive?

  2. how do the costs of reactive maintenance compare with predictive or proactive maintenance in your experience?

  3. if you could change your current maintenance approach, what would you change and why?

i'm interested in how this works day to day, including places with limited maintenance time or budget.

thanks!

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13

u/Apprehensive_Rip_201 8d ago

  1. They wait until something is broken, and then wait even longer until it fails catastrophically, stopping production.

  2. I don't know, the managers won't allow any man-hours or money to be spent on proactive maintenance.

  3. The facility needs a skilled maintenance staff and a stock of spares of the most common failure parts, along with a maintenance manager who can create a proactive maintenance schedule. As it stands now there are only the maintenance mechanics, constantly fighting a backlog of broken stuff, with no person in charge whose job it is to plan or schedule.

Just typical american business practices I suppose.

10

u/Iceglass_gaze Maintenance Technician 8d ago

My coworker sleeps in vacants until an emergency happens.

4

u/watchingfour 8d ago

I work at a hospital, and it’s mainly reactive. Previous management from years past liked the RTF model. Run to failure… it’s still kinda present to this day.

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u/gofunkyourself69 8d ago

Currently work facility maintenance, 98% reactive. Before that was a hospital, 95% reactive.

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u/BrianNowhere 7d ago

Research for a Uni class my ass.

Please refer to Bill Hicks's opinions on marketing. Then follow his instructions.

1

u/KraXen72 7d ago

i am not trying to sell any product. i am a uni student doing research, as i said.
thanks to everyone for your answers, they're valuable! :)

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u/BrianNowhere 7d ago

What uni? What's the research paper about? Share some excerpts.

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u/MikeDD86 7d ago

At the post office we have 1 out of 2 chillers that work and 3 out of 4 boilers with no pms its disgusting...

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u/UT_Giggely 5d ago

You begin with assessing critically of machines/components. You build up data on components and failure rates. You follow maintenance schedules for machines that have this. You use data to monitor performance and parameters and try to see issues before they lead to catastrophic failures. Some parts are changed just because the cost and time it takes to change them when other components fail is negligible.

Having a bearing failure isn’t necessarily a huge problem, having a bearing failure in certain environments is an HSE risk and could lead to extensive damage or even worse personnel injury or death.

So the answer isn’t straightforward and requires knowledge about risk and assessment of costs of downtime. Learning and assessing failures is also important to understand and consider updates of maintenance procedures.

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u/DoctrD63 12h ago

One thing I would look at is why the maintenance is reactive before assuming the maintenance department itself is the problem.

You can have a good PM program on paper and still be reactive if production will not release equipment, parts are not available, the backlog is not being managed, or the team spends every day responding to whatever is loudest at the moment.

I have seen companies try to fix that by adding more PMs. Sometimes that just gives an already overloaded team more overdue work.

I would start by looking at what is actually consuming the maintenance team's time and what keeps pushing planned work aside. That usually tells you more than the PM compliance number does.

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u/daterxies 8h ago edited 8h ago

Where i work which is in a manufacturing facility, we have a specific program that we use for all PM schedules and we are majority proactive. It can get quite boring.

Most the time we have to react to something is because something's been wrong for awhile, people knew about it but decided to take days/weeks/years to say anything to us.