We all know the importance of being proactive. We take precautions, make plans, budget for contingencies, and do hundreds of other things in our daily and professional lives to prepare for the expected (and unexpected) events that are waiting for us in the future. Being proactive gives us the confidence to go about our business without having to fret every waking moment about what's coming our way.
The alternative—being reactive—may mean less work on the front end, but it can be disastrous when the unexpected happens. Without an evacuation plan, what happens if your family’s home catches fire? Without a little emergency money in the bank, what happens if the car suddenly needs a new set of tires?
Proactive thinking has a place in every part of our personal and working lives – particularly if we work with equipment like HVAC systems or industrial machinery. Failing to think proactively when it comes to our company’s valuable systems can lead to issues that cost money, time, and even our employees’ health.
This month, we're going to look more closely at the difference between reactive and proactive maintenance programs and why planning ahead beats waiting and seeing every single time.
What Is Reactive Maintenance?
Far too many business owners and managers practice reactive maintenance. It's a lot easier on the front end, after all—just wait until something breaks, fix it, and then move on.
It's an easy and tempting trap to fall into. Everything is running just fine right now, and there doesn't seem to be a failure on the horizon, so why spend time on maintenance tasks?
The failure in that way of thinking becomes apparent when something breaks. Every step of your production relies on every other step, and they all depend on the occupancy and comfort systems that keep your team performing at its best.
It could be something as small as a little switch or as massive as an entire chiller assembly – but when it stops working, so does your team. Every moment tools are down, your productivity falls, and your bottom line takes a bigger hit. Imagine that a failure takes eight employees offline, and the failure takes an hour to repair – that's an entire day's worth of productivity lost. And when an occupancy system fails, it takes a lot more than just eight people off the job; it shutters your entire plant or office.
Compounding that is the fact that many failures can’t be repaired in an hour. Just sourcing the parts for some equipment can take weeks or even months, creating stoppages that can be existential threats to your entire business. With today’s fragile and inconsistent supply chains, more and more repairs are becoming harder and harder to make quickly.
What Is Proactive Maintenance?
You may already perform proactive maintenance in your personal life. Every few months, you take your car in for an oil change or put it on jack stands and do it yourself. That's proactive maintenance: there's nothing wrong with your car. It's running fine. You might be able to drive it for another 40,000 miles without ever touching the oil filler cap.
But you know that old oil motor oil breaks down, becoming less effective at lubricating the moving parts in your engine. And with the cost of a new engine rivaling that of a new car, you take a couple of hours a couple of times a year to get the old oil flushed and new, clear oil added.
Your business’s HVAC, occupancy, and industrial systems deserve the same attention. Just one HVAC unit for a large facility can cost as much as a dozen cars like the one you take such good care of at home.
Proactive maintenance refers to a whole array of practices that help keep equipment running reliably for the longest possible time. It can include simple, obvious things like lubricant flush-and-fills, condenser coil cleaning, and refrigerant servicing. However, it can also include advanced practices like predictive component replacement, lubricant analysis, and dozens of other things that can give you a highly accurate picture of your equipment's status and potential failures that are still months or years off.
Why Choose Proactive Maintenance?
There are plenty of excellent reasons to choose a proactive maintenance program for your industrial systems, like the ones we provide at Hays Service. Here are just a few of the best ones.
Proactive Maintenance Is Cheaper
You may have heard this from a technician before: you can fix it now, or you can fix it later, but it’s cheaper to fix it now. Nearly every proactive maintenance task is considerably less expensive than the eventual repair that neglecting your maintenance will result in. Let’s go back to the oil change scenario:
Even using top-of-the-line synthetic oil, an oil change is usually less than $150. If you leave old oil in your engine long enough, you will eventually suffer from a bearing failure or a scored cylinder wall, requiring an engine overhaul or replacement. The current estimate for replacing the engine in a late-model sedan is about $8,000. If you change oil twice a year, you can pay for 26 years' worth of oil changes before you’ve paid for one engine replacement.
Now, scale those prices up to the dollar amount your company pays for your industrial systems.
Proactive Maintenance Is Faster
We can continue with the oil change analogy: changing oil takes your car off the road for an hour or two. An engine replacement takes weeks or months. Your industrial equipment is no different.
Having a trained technician come and perform thorough proactive maintenance on your systems might mean a little bit of downtime – downtime that you can schedule at your convenience for a time when it has minimal impact on your workflows – but not nearly as much as system replacement requires.
Many of our customers can have their entire HVAC or other industrial systems maintained in just one day a few times a year. That includes any small repairs that need to be handled, routine maintenance tasks, and special predictive monitoring that allows us to detect tiny irregularities in your machinery's operations and diagnose small issues before they become major problems.
Proactive Maintenance Improves Productivity
Failure to maintain your equipment may not seem like a problem. After all, like we said at the beginning of this article, things are running fine right now.
But are they?
Poorly maintained equipment always gives subpar performance. Your air handlers don't move air as efficiently. Your industrial machines run a tiny bit slower. Your chillers don't cool as effectively as they did when they were new. You don't notice the performance decline because it happens gradually; you write it off as "normal wear and tear." What you need to know is that your lost productivity can be recovered.
With a proactive maintenance program, you can be sure that your equipment is running at its absolute best all year round.
Choosing a Trusted Partner for Proactive Maintenance
When it comes to the machines that keep your facility working, can you afford to trust your maintenance program to anyone other than the best? At Hays Service, we’ve been the region’s go-to experts for HVAC and industrial systems for almost 80 years, and you won’t find a team that’s more dedicated to ensuring your company’s success.
Whether your needs only reach so far as an HVAC system for your small family-run business or encompass massive facilities in almost any industrial sector, we’ve got your back. Our maintenance contract customers enjoy the best in proactive maintenance, expert guidance, and even priority scheduling for service calls when the unexpected does inevitably happen.
So, as summer begins to wind down, start reviewing your maintenance program. Is it proactive? If not, it may be time to give us a call and let us show you how Hays helps keep you one step ahead. (And remember to take your car in for an oil change!)
Looking to the future,
Coach Cal