Does preventive maintenance pay on this asset?
Preventive maintenance costs money whether or not it prevents a failure, so it only pays when it stops enough unplanned breakdowns to cover its own cost. Enter your failure and maintenance numbers and see the net annual saving, and the point where condition-based maintenance would do better. Numbers update as you type.
Your assets
Model one asset type at a time. Use the failure rate you actually see, not the one you wish you had.
Run to failure vs the PM program
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Feed it a real failure rate, not a guess.
This calculator is only as honest as the failures per year you put in. The free OEE Tracker logs each stop and separates breakdowns from planned maintenance, so the number you feed in is measured, not remembered.
Open the free OEE TrackerSchedule the maintenance that pays, skip the maintenance that does not.
A fixed calendar wastes effort on assets that fail at random. Fabrico triggers preventive work by real runtime and condition read straight from the machine, closes the loop from a detected fault to an auto-routed work order, and keeps a complete record so every task is proof, not a guess.
Book a Fabrico demoWhen preventive maintenance pays, and when it does not
Preventive maintenance is a fixed cost you pay whether or not a failure was actually coming. It pays on assets whose failures are driven by age and wear, where a timely service resets the clock. It does not pay on assets that fail at random, where a calendar service is about as likely to introduce a fault as prevent one. The classic reliability finding is that only a minority of failure modes are age-related, so a blanket schedule on everything wastes money, and the answer for the rest is condition-based or predictive maintenance.
The math
Run-to-failure cost = assets times unplanned failures per year times cost per failure. PM program cost = assets times PM visits per year times cost per visit. Remaining failure cost = run-to-failure cost times (1 minus the failure reduction). Net saving = run-to-failure cost minus the sum of the PM program cost and the remaining failure cost. Return on PM spend = net saving divided by the PM program cost. If the number turns negative, the schedule costs more than the breakdowns it prevents.
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is work scheduled at fixed time or usage intervals to lower the chance of a breakdown, as opposed to reactive maintenance (fix it after it fails) and predictive maintenance (act on the asset's real condition). See the full preventive vs predictive maintenance guide.
Why doesn't PM always pay?
Because it is a fixed cost. If a failure mode is random rather than age-related, a fixed schedule does not reduce it and may add risk each time the asset is opened up. For those assets, condition-based maintenance pays where a calendar does not, which is why the failure-reduction input matters so much here.
How do I pick the PM interval?
Base it on real runtime or condition, not just the calendar. Too frequent wastes labour, too rare lets failures through. Automatic runtime capture from the machine makes this far easier, which is what Fabrico provides. See also the CMMS ROI calculator and the OEE improvement ROI calculator, and benchmark your total spend with the maintenance cost as % of RAV calculator.
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