Reactive maintenance is the work that happens after something breaks. A motor fails, a conveyor stops, a pump leaks — and a technician is dispatched to fix it. There is no scheduling, no planning, just response.
Every maintenance team does some reactive work. The question is how much of the total. Mature operations push this ratio down by investing in preventive and predictive maintenance, because reactive work is expensive in three ways:
- Downtime: the asset is out of service while the failure is diagnosed and repaired.
- Labor: emergency calls disrupt the rest of the schedule and often require overtime.
- Parts and damage: a failure that happens unexpectedly often damages adjacent components or causes secondary problems.
The industry consensus is that an emergency repair costs roughly 3-5x what the same repair would have cost if performed during planned maintenance.
When reactive maintenance is the right choice
Not every asset is worth maintaining proactively. For low-criticality items that are cheap to replace and fail in a non-disruptive way (a desk lamp, a non-critical sensor), run-to-failure is rational. The cost of preventing the failure exceeds the cost of the failure itself.
The art of a maintenance program is deciding which assets get preventive attention and which can be left to fail on their own.