What Are the Benefits & Costs of Proactive Maintenance Strategies?

The "fix it when it breaks" model has ended. Manufacturers are realizing the power of proactive maintenance and how it’s a significant factor in keeping their customers happy and equipment running smoothly. By prioritizing asset health and uptime, manufacturers can deliver the experiences today's customers demand.

What is proactive maintenance?

Proactive maintenance is a strategy that prioritizes the prevention of equipment failures instead of simply reacting to them at the moment they occur, or fixing them afterward.

What are proactive maintenance strategies?

There are different ways to deliver proactive service depending on the digital maturity of the service business, with preventive maintenance being the most widely used model today.

The proactive maintenance models

Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance refers to the regularly scheduled maintenance of an asset. Much like the regular service visits you have for your car, preventive maintenance plans ensure assets are kept in tip-top shape over time to prevent failures and extend the life of the assets. Preventative maintenance can be Time-based, Counter/Usage-based, or Condition-based.

• Time-based preventive maintenance refers to when service visits are pre-scheduled using set calendar-specific time intervals that will best ensure assets stay up and running. This could look like inspection visits every 12 months and maintenance visits every 6 months.
• Counter or usage-based preventive maintenance refers to when service visits are executed when the asset has seen a certain amount of use. So rather than a forklift being serviced every 3 months, it would be serviced every time it clocks 250 hours of use.
• Condition-based preventive maintenance is the most advanced form of maintenance in this category. It uses changes in technical attributes, other installed product updates, or IoT-generated data on the condition of the asset to trigger alerts when a threshold is breached and automatically launch actions. This could look like a service visit being scheduled if a machine falls outside of a defined temperature range.

Predictive maintenance

As organizations mature and progress on their digital transformation journey, they can apply Predictive maintenance. This approach requires service organizations to feed comprehensive asset and service data into advanced analytics tools with machine learning capabilities to recognize patterns, establish baselines for normal asset behavior, and predict when to deliver maintenance to prevent failures. Take the example of an overheating machine, instead of informing service organizations about its failure after it happened, predictive maintenance will tell them when a machine is likely to fail in the future.

Prescriptive Maintenance

Conceptually, the final proactive strategy, Prescriptive maintenance is similar to Predictive Maintenance but takes it one step further. On top of predicting failures, prescriptive maintenance recommends the right actions to take by leveraging prescriptive analytics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. In the case of the overheated machine that would mean prescriptive methods will notify service teams for when to expect the failure and will suggest, for example, swapping a part out, reducing the speed, or getting a technician onsite.

These service strategies are closely related, and service organizations may find the transitions between them to be fluid, often including more than one in their portfolio. For some assets or asset families, a time-based approach might be best, whereas IoT-connected devices experience greater benefits from a condition-based plan.

What are the benefits of proactive maintenance?

There are numerous benefits with preventive maintenance compared to reactive service, and the more advanced your proactive maintenance strategies are, the bigger the payoff you’ll receive. By becoming more proactive, you can avoid instances of costly unplanned downtime, deliver more efficient and profitable service, create happier customers, and lay the foundation for even more advanced service strategies.

Reduce costs and improve service margin

Mission-critical equipment can fail at the worst times and lead to thousands of dollars in unplanned maintenance costs. Studies show that unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually and unplanned work is 7x more expensive than planned work.

Unexpected downtimes are synonymous with exorbitant expenditures—getting technicians onsite, expediting the shipping of needed parts, sending and installing replacement units, or field engineers’ overtime. Depending on whether an asset is covered by warranty or service contract—and the details of the contractual agreements—these unplanned costs will hit the books of either the service organization, the manufacturer, or both.

With preventive maintenance, the cost of unplanned downtime can be extensively reduced or even eliminated. In addition, scheduling preventive maintenance visits well in advance, proactive maintenance allows companies to make more thoughtful planning choices, such as bundling service jobs at a location, planning parts replacements for better deals, and implementing product modifications to minimize truck rolls.

Improve customer experience

With customer experience as a priority differentiator for manufacturers, maximizing uptime is the number one priority for them. Proactive maintenance creates happier customers who are more likely to renew and upgrade service contracts and buy new machines. For OEMs, asset uptime and reliability are especially important, as customers won’t want to do repeat business with a manufacturer of equipment that they view as prone to failure or unreliable.

There are also added benefits that come with the more advanced forms of proactive service. With condition-based preventive maintenance, you are able to deliver an advanced service schedule that results in better uptime and reduced costs by preventing the over-delivery of service. With predictive maintenance, you have an increased level of accuracy by relying on data-driven analytics to inform your service strategy. And with prescriptive maintenance, you can develop sophisticated maintenance models that guarantee maximum uptime and asset performance at a minimal cost.

What are the costs of proactive maintenance?

Adopting a proactive service model requires a level of digital transformation maturity that provides asset visibility, standardized data collection, a moderate-to-high level of automation, and resource scheduling. This means your service organization should be using field service management software, not manual, pen-and-paper processes.

To build a foundation for proactive maintenance, you may need to consider:

• System integration: Ensuring your existing systems "talk" to each other might require an initial foundation investment. This could involve hardware and software solutions to facilitate seamless data flow.
• Staff training: Your team may need training to analyze and interpret the wealth of data generated by proactive maintenance. This could involve workshops or upskilling programs to equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills.
• Technology and software: Investment in specific technology and software might be necessary to ensure data flows seamlessly and your data collection capabilities are as robust as your field service execution.

Proactive strategies become increasingly more complex as you go from preventive to predictive to prescriptive. To take advantage of the more advanced forms of proactive maintenance, you may have to initially put in more effort, time, expertise, and investment.

While the initial investments in infrastructure, training, and technology for proactive maintenance may seem substantial, the long-term returns far outweigh the costs. By preventing equipment failures, reducing downtime, and enhancing customer satisfaction, organizations can produce long-term results that reduce service costs throughout the equipment lifecycle and give you a competitive edge. Partnering with a robust field service management and IoT solution that aligns with industry best practices is essential for maximizing the return on your investment.

How can I get started with proactive maintenance?

Assess and standardize the type of maintenance plans/offerings your organization is prepared to provide to the devices in your install base.

• Understand the nature of that maintenance (whether it is based on the passage of time, usage milestones, or data provided by the device)
• Estimate the skills, duration, and scheduling requirements for the maintenance

Review your organization’s installed base records and validate that the information is both accurate and useful.

• Is the data reliable? Is every device correctly accounted for and organized within the Installed Base hierarchy?
• Are the metrics needed to generate maintenance visits being captured in the Installed Base?

Identify KPI goals/objectives for your business with proactive maintenance.

• Reduce Asset Downtime
• Increase Technician Efficiency
• Optimize Scheduling

Because proactive maintenance strategies are important to have in place, you need a trusted and reliable partner to help your strategy execute in the best way possible. Our product, ServiceMax, offers an easy-to-use and reliable proactive maintenance solution.