Is Your Plant Maintenance Strategy Successful?

Your question implies that these strategies are mutually exclusive.

In the real world you fit in maintenance jobs when the plant is not producing (proactive), monitor the condition of your plant so you know what you need to do in the shut down periods (predictive), employ your maintenance personnel while the plant is running in greasing nipples and tightening bolts (preventative), and fix it when it breaks (reactive).

There is ONE universal maintenance strategy, KEEP IT RUNNING

So right - maximise asset uptime. And the proactive approach is very worthwhile if the costs justifies it. Obviously one uses the reactive approach as little as possible, due to customer/safety/production issues, but sometimes it is ok (I only replace the lamps in my house when they fail, as any predictive approach is not economically viable in this situation. However, if my high speed DC circuit breakers trip or fail too often, serious investigations are called for.

I find myself thinking just like jhhassociates did "Your question implies ...", as I think many others who use CR4 do. I think you guys at GlobalSpec need to make your question/discussion topic shorter and less opinionated to be non-biased.

But like Gideon said, a balanced approach customized for each particular company, process, facility, etc. is best.

To mention that "55% of all plants follow a reactive strategy" is totally useless to the reader without knowing where that stat came from, how that data was collected, demographics involved, etc. I have heard of a rare situation (maybe like .001%) a plant purposely does 99% reactive (run to breakdown). Heard of others who reply "what is process-based maintenance". ha

You should be wording it ...

"There are four common maintenance strategies: reactive (failure-based), preventive (time-based maintenance), predictive (condition-based), and proactive (process-based). Which approach does your plant PRIMARILY follow (if any) and how successful is primarily following that single strategy?"

If you wanted more valuable replies in the discussion, you should also add ...

"If you use a combination of the above strategies, what percentages of each do you apply and why? If you could change to be more successfully, how would you?"

That, in my opinion would create much more useful discussions.