What preventive and reactive maintenance are
Preventive and reactive maintenance are two approaches to keeping equipment and facilities working.
Preventive maintenance is scheduled in advance, before anything fails. Servicing, inspections and part replacements happen on a planned cycle based on time or usage, so that an asset keeps running and small issues are caught before they become breakdowns. It costs planning effort but reduces unexpected failures and downtime.
Reactive maintenance happens after the fact. An asset breaks down or develops a fault, and a team responds to fix it. It requires no upfront scheduling, but a failure can be more expensive, more disruptive and worse-timed than planned work, especially for critical equipment.
Most operations use a mix. Critical and high-use assets are maintained preventively, while minor or low-risk items may be left to reactive repair. The aim is to shift the balance toward preventive work where downtime is costly.
Maintenance in the Cohiva platform
Cohiva Control schedules preventive maintenance, raises work orders and tracks asset history. Planned tasks are scheduled against each asset and turned into work orders before failure, while reactive work can also be raised and tracked when something breaks. Because both run through one system with full preventive maintenance scheduling, an operator can see the maintenance history of every asset and shift the balance from reactive repairs toward planned upkeep.