The Importance of Proactive Maintenance
What is Proactive Maintenance?
Proactive maintenance is planned maintenance that enhances the lifespan of your building’s assets, equipment, and your company infrastructure. Fundamentally, proactive maintenance might be described as the opposite of reactive maintenance. Reactive maintenance operates on a “run-to-failure” philosophy. Proactive maintenance, on the other hand, takes steps to anticipate and resolve problems before they occur. This type of maintenance includes cleaning, painting, carpentry, repairs, replacements, etc. In essence, proactive maintenance addresses the small problems before they become larger ones.
Is Proactive Maintenance the same as Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance programs use time or usage-based intervals for inspection, part replacement, and other pre-planned activities. Proactive maintenance is a bit different than preventative maintenance in that it focuses on the root cause of failure. For example, a preventive maintenance strategy might call for inspecting the walls of your building every six months and repairing it when it is degraded beyond specified limits. Proactive maintenance would, however, include tracking known causes of failure, such as inadequate ventilation, or contamination, as well as, traffic flow, and then triggering maintenance activities based on these factors. In essence, preventative maintenance fixes the wall when it degrades, proactive maintenance fixes the source of the walls degradation so that the wall may need repairs less frequently.
Why Adopt a Proactive Maintenance Plan?
Proactive maintenance is known to:
save more money annually because issues that may have occurred from aging infrastructures are not a factor.
safety hazards are lessened
equipment and assets lasts longer
productivity is increased
less energy is used
and insurance premiums are lowered.
With proactive maintenance, you can make data-backed decisions and find issues that could cause disruption before something occurs. Your team can look ahead, feel in control, and make the best repair or replacement decision for your facility based on costs, seasonality, and availability. You have more choices in how much you pay for materials, who will do the maintenance work, and when it gets done. This allows your entire facilities program to operate at a much higher level, with more value for the money you spend.
Developing a Proactive Maintenance Plan
Whether you are a corporate space, education institution, warehouse, retail location, small office or real estate management firm first, ask yourself, how is your facility operating today?
There are many different types of tools out there to help you to develop a proactive maintenance plan. Top performing facilities operate at a ratio of 75% proactive vs 25% reactive maintenance and begin their planning process with establishing program goals, leadership, budgets, and a list of vendors to use.
Get started by contacting Cobb Brothers Company today. 508-655-7910 We are happy to set up a visit to go over your facility’s painting and carpentry requirements and help get you on the path to using a proactive maintenance plan.