Guide
Breakdown repair vs planned maintenance: the real trade-off
Updated
The same hours cost more when you buy them at short notice, and the parts cost more when you buy them at short notice too. That is most of the argument, but it is not all of it.
What changes between the two
| Breakdown | Planned | |
|---|---|---|
| When it happens | Whenever the machine decides | A slot you choose, usually a shutdown |
| Labour rate | Callout plus, often, an out-of-hours premium | Standard rate, scheduled into a route |
| Diagnosis | Paid for on site, under time pressure | Largely already done from condition data |
| Parts | Whatever can be got today, at whatever it costs | Ordered on lead time, at catalogue price |
| Downtime | Unplanned, and usually at the worst moment | Planned, and overlapped with other work |
| Quality of repair | Constrained by what can be done with the line stopped | Full scope possible, including things spotted on the way |
The honest case for reactive repair
Not every machine deserves a planned regime. If a unit is cheap to replace, has no safety function, and its failure does not stop anything else, running it to failure can be the rational choice. The mistake is applying that logic by default to machines whose failure stops a line, because the downtime is invisible in the maintenance budget and very visible in the production one.
What a planned maintenance contract should actually contain
- A defined asset list, with what is covered on each machine and what is explicitly out of scope.
- Visit frequency and duration, with what happens if a visit is missed.
- A response time for breakdowns, and whether contract customers get priority over ad hoc callers.
- Rates for work outside the contract, because there will be some, and this is where contracts get expensive quietly.
- What is included in the visit: consumables, filters, lubricants, calibration, and whether the engineer's report covers work identified for later.
- Spares strategy, including which critical parts are held, by whom, and who owns them.
- Exit terms, including whether you keep the maintenance records. You should.
The question that settles most of these arguments
- Work out what an hour of downtime costs on that machine, in lost output, labour standing idle and any penalty for missed delivery. Order-of-magnitude is enough.
- Ask how long a worst-case repair would take if the machine failed today with no spares held. Include parts lead time, not just labour.
- Multiply. That number, not the service quotation, is what you are actually deciding about.
- Then decide what to hold in stores. For many production machines the strategic spare, not the contract, is the thing that removes the risk.
None of the above needs a benchmark statistic to be useful. Your downtime cost, your parts lead times and your failure history are the only inputs that matter, and you already have all three.