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What are the four types of maintenance strategies?

Ensuring that your equipment is working safely and efficiently is crucial for keeping your business operating smoothly. From predictive measures to preventative steps, in our guide we discuss four different approaches for asset management to help you make an informed decision on what may work best for your operations and assets.
24 March 2025

Four common maintenance strategies

1. Predictive maintenance strategy 

A form of condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance involves continually monitoring the performance of your equipment to predict any issues or failings. By using advanced techniques with computers and sensors, the right information can be provided to the right people at the right time to reduce risk and equipment failures. 

2. Proactive maintenance strategy 

The aim of proactive maintenance is to determine the root cause of any equipment failures and repair them before they cause more issues and lead to failures. Implementing proactive maintenance in your business can maximize the lifespan of assets and contribute to workplace safety. 

3. Preventative maintenance strategy 

A planned and scheduled approached to asset reliability, total preventative maintenance is where inspections are carried out at fixed times based on the usage and age of the asset. This approach doesn’t consider the condition of the asset, as it aims to find issues using preventative maintenance software to hopefully prevent larger issues further down the line, such as full engine failure. 

4. Reactive maintenance strategy 

Unlike preventive maintenance, reactive maintenance services involve responding to equipment failures or breakdowns after they occur to fix the issue. This takes out the element of trying to predict or prevent faults beforehand and relies on responding quickly to issues as they arise. This can include maintenance of an asset that has already broken down, corrective maintenance to fix a minor issue to restore working order or emergency repairs that requires a quick response. 

Preventive vs predictive maintenance: What’s the difference?

Whilst both these approaches share the same goal of reducing unplanned incidents, downtime and improving reliability and lifespan of assets, they both take slightly different approaches. The main difference between preventive and predictive maintenance is how they use data. 

Preventative maintenance uses historical data to schedule routine inspections, while predictive maintenance uses real time data to monitor the condition of an asset to flag and resolve issues earlier than preventative maintenance. 

 

According to the Deloitte Analytics Institute, predictive maintenance can lower maintenance costs by up to 25% while boosting uptime by 10–20%.

Asset Maintenance at BES Group

If you’re not sure which strategy is best for your business, our team of experts can help. We can work with you to put a manageable condition-based maintenance plan in place that is tailored to the individual needs of your business and assets. 

Get in touch with our dedicated Asset Reliability Team today

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