One of the most important ways to save money on retail maintenance is to prioritise the equipment you need most, plan around the riskiest assets you have and be prepared as best as possible for the ‘expected unexpected’.
If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail, after all!
Working with a maintenance partner ensures that you won’t be out of commission for long, saving you money, time and stress.
To develop a maintenance plan that works for you, here are five strategies for properly using proactive and reactive maintenance strategies, as well as the important distinctions between the two.
What Is The Difference Between Proactive And Reactive Maintenance?
The difference between reactive maintenance and preventative maintenance is the difference between fixing something whenever it breaks and fixing something before it has the chance to break.
A proactive or preventative maintenance strategy involves identifying faults ahead of time, anticipating the potential for failures and taking steps to fix them before a breakdown.
For example, reactive maintenance is waiting until your HVAC system breaks down entirely before you contact an emergency repair team to fix it and get it up and running again.
By contrast, proactive maintenance spots a potential fault with your HVAC system, such as with a sensor, a dusty intake vent or a heating element, and schedules a repair team to fix it at a time that suits you.
Whilst proactive maintenance is typically preferable, they are not mutually exclusive; you typically need both a preventative maintenance strategy and a reactive maintenance contingency plan when something unexpected goes wrong.
Here are five approaches you can take to save money with both proactive and reactive maintenance.
1. Examine Your Existing Patterns Of Failure
Proactive maintenance is about examining ‘known unknowns’ and the ‘expected unexpected’; whilst you may not know when a component or asset may fail, there are often predictable rates at which they do.
The best way to figure this out is to look back at your existing maintenance information, including previous costs, previously identified failures, increments between repairs and other information that helps you to schedule maintenance further in advance.
This strategy, often broadly known as reliability-centred maintenance, helps to stop small problems from escalating, extends the lifespan of your equipment and saves you money.
The 6 Patterns Of Failure
A core principle in reliability-centred maintenance is to understand that the failure of components typically emerges in patterns. F. Stanley Nowland, in his 1978 book on Reliability-Centred Maintenance, found that there were six common patterns of failure:
- A: Bathtub – Equipment that is more likely to fail at the start and end of its operational life
- B: Wear-Out Phase – A traditional failure curve where equipment has a consistent failure rate until it suddenly and sharply increases near the end of its operational life
- C: Gradual – A constant increase in failure risk over time
- D: Rapid Increase to Constant – An initially low risk of failure before increasing to a relatively consistent failure rate
- E: Constant – No consistent pattern of failures
- F: Initial Mortality – A high risk of manufacturing defect before dropping to a more constant and consistent rate of failure.
2. Prioritise Your Most Critical Assets
As with a remarkable number of aspects of life, the Pareto Principle will also shape your priorities for proactive and reactive maintenance, in terms of both budget and scheduling.
The principle is that 80 per cent of the functioning of your business and your overall success (effects) come from just 20 per cent of your overall assets, and conversely that the majority of your maintenance issues come from a relative minority of causes.
Identify the core business assets that are necessary for your business to function and ensure they are the primary focus of your maintenance schedule.
By focusing the majority of your attention and maintenance budget on maintaining what you require to operate, you will avoid potential downtime and the revenue loss associated with it.
3. Develop A Risk-Based Maintenance Plan
Prioritising critical assets is just one approach you can take to prioritising maintenance. Another method is to take a risk-based approach to your maintenance and prioritise the assets that are most likely to fail.
Instead of strictly focusing on the assets most commonly required, this focuses on the assets most likely to break down or most likely to damage the company if they do, rather than wasting resources on equipment that is unlikely to fail irrespective of its importance.
There are two ways to define ‘risk’ in a risk-based maintenance plan:
- The likelihood of a component breaking down
- The impact a component or piece of equipment breaking down would have on a business
Both are important, and being aware of where your potential risks are not only stops any crucial downtime but also means that repair and remedial works are significantly cheaper.
4. Schedule Maintenance Before You Need Critical Assets
Most retailers operate in a seasonal industry, with peaks and valleys. For most shops, the peak is Black Friday, and this is where your shop floor’s systems will be put to their biggest test.
You cannot afford, figuratively and literally, for anything significant to go wrong during the winter shopping season, which means that scheduled proactive maintenance is not only more affordable than emergency winter callouts but will also potentially pay for itself.
5. Have Clear Procedures For When Reactive Maintenance Is Unavoidable
Whilst the best way to save money on maintenance is to avoid reactive maintenance wherever possible, there will always be a risk of potential failures that you could not predict.
You can effectively reduce costs here by working with a maintenance partner that specialises in reactive maintenance, developing a set of procedures and emergency resources to ensure that any failures can be mitigated as soon as possible.
One of the best examples of this in action is the so-called Waffle House Index, an informal disaster preparedness metric which is used to highlight the impact of environmental disasters in a particular area.
This is only possible because the restaurant chain has an infamous reputation for staying open, with both robust infrastructure and several contingency plans (backup generators, reduced menus) allowing it to stay in operation even following hurricanes, storms or tornadoes.