From Reactive to Planned: A Practical First 90 Days

In a demanding manufacturing environment, maintenance teams can easily find themselves trapped in a cycle of firefighting.

A conveyor stops unexpectedly. A packaging machine develops a fault. A motor needs replacing. Production calls with another urgent problem. Before long, the maintenance schedule has been overtaken by breakdowns and engineers are moving from one emergency to the next.

Reactive maintenance may keep production moving in the short term, but it can also lead to unpredictable and highly stressful downtime, higher repair costs, potential safety risks and limited opportunities to address the underlying causes of equipment failure.

Conciously progressing towards planned maintenance can provide material benefits and reduce risks. But it does not mean changing everything overnight.

With a structured plan and a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) such as ShireSystem from Eleco, the first 90 days can be transformative by taking the time to understand your current position, establish priorities and begin shifting maintenance from reactive intervention towards greater control and certainty.

Days 1–30: Understand what you have

Before creating new maintenance schedules, understand what you are maintaining.

For a packaging manufacturer, that could include filling and sealing equipment, conveyors, labelling machines, compressors, palletisers, robotics, forklifts and other production-critical assets.

The first step is therefore to establish or improve your asset register.

Identify the equipment that has the greatest impact on production and start capturing essential information within ShireSystem. This might include location, manufacturer, model, maintenance history and relevant documentation.

Prioritise the assets where failure would have the greatest operational impact, rather than tyring to perfect everything immediately.

Next, establish your maintenance baseline. How much work is currently reactive? Which machines generate the most breakdowns? Where are engineers spending their time? How much production is being lost?

This creates a starting point against which future improvement can be measured.

Broxburn Bottlers followed a similar approach when implementing ShireSystem. Within three months, its assets had been identified within the system, documentation configured and core maintenance information covering production equipment, forklifts, checklists, inspections and maintenance plans brought together.

Broxburn Engineering Manager Bill Richards explained the value simply:

“We can understand what we’re spending our time on and whether that use of time is productive.”

Days 31–60: Start planning the right work

Once you have visibility of your assets and workload, the next stage is to identify where planned maintenance can have the greatest impact.

Look at your most critical equipment and ask some straightforward questions.

Which assets fail most frequently? Which failures cause the greatest production disruption? Are there recurring problems that could be prevented through routine inspection, servicing or component replacement?

Start building preventive maintenance schedules around these priorities.

For example, rather than waiting for a conveyor motor to fail during a production run, scheduled inspections could identify wear, overheating or vibration before failure occurs. Packaging machinery might require routine lubrication, cleaning, belt inspections or replacement of high-wear components based on manufacturer recommendations and your own maintenance history.

ShireSystem can be used to schedule planned preventive maintenance, create work orders and give engineers visibility of upcoming tasks, helping maintenance teams balance scheduled work against unexpected requirements.

This doesn’t mean eliminating reactive maintenance in 60 days. The objective is to begin changing the balance.

ShireSystem’s maintenance maturity approach reflects this progression. Organisations at the earliest stage may have less than 40% of maintenance planned, while the next stage establishes greater preventive maintenance structure, targeting 40–59% planned work.

Days 61–90: Measure, learn and improve

By the third month, you should be generating something extremely valuable: maintenance data.

Now you can start using it.

Review the information captured through completed work orders and ask what it tells you about your operation. Useful measures could include planned versus reactive maintenance, downtime, recurring failures, overdue work, engineer utilisation and maintenance costs.

This is where a CMMS becomes more than a digital job list.

Instead of relying on assumptions about which equipment causes the greatest problems, maintenance managers can use ShireSystem’s dashboards, KPIs and reporting capabilities to identify trends and support better decisions.

Broxburn Bottlers began tracking measures including reactive versus planned maintenance and planned runtime versus unplanned maintenance work through ShireSystem. Its longer-term objective was clear: “moving away from reactive engineering to more planned maintenance work.”

Most importantly, use the information to refine your maintenance programme.

If an inspection repeatedly finds no issues, does it need to happen as frequently? If the same component continues to fail, should the maintenance interval change? Does the problem require maintenance at all, or is there a stronger case for replacing the asset?

Building momentum beyond 90 days

The first 90 days are about establishing control, not achieving maintenance perfection.

The experience of Ibstock Brick demonstrates what can happen when that foundation develops further. The manufacturer has been using ShireSystem as part of its transition from reactive to planned preventive maintenance. At an initial factory, Ibstock reported a 10% increase in Overall Equipment Effectiveness and a 13% increase in asset availability within five months.

It also used ShireSystem to standardise processes, centralise asset information and capture knowledge from experienced engineers.

For manufacturers, including businesses operating fast-moving packaging and production lines, this is an important point. Planned maintenance is not simply about creating more scheduled jobs.

It is about gradually building the asset information, processes and maintenance history needed to make better decisions.

The first 30 days give you visibility. The next 30 introduce greater planning. The final 30 begin turning maintenance data into improvement.

From there, the process continues.

With ShireSystem providing a central platform for assets, work orders, preventive maintenance and performance information, manufacturers can keep increasing the proportion of planned work, improving asset reliability and reducing their dependence on firefighting.

Ultimately the goal isn’t to stop reacting to breakdowns in 90 days. It’s to make sure there are fewer breakdowns to react to.