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Reactive maintenance is an unavoidable part of facilities management. Equipment fails, things break and unexpected problems need attention. The challenge is making sure those problems are reported, prioritised and resolved efficiently, while understanding when repeated reactive maintenance might point to a bigger issue.
Here are 10 common questions about reactive maintenance and how facilities teams can manage it effectively.
Reactive maintenance is maintenance carried out in response to a fault, failure or problem after it has occurred. For example, if a tap starts leaking and a maintenance team is called to repair it, that is reactive maintenance.
Other examples include:
Unlike planned preventive maintenance, reactive maintenance is triggered by a problem rather than a predefined schedule.
The main difference is what triggers the work.
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Most facilities teams need both. Planned maintenance can help manage assets proactively, but it cannot prevent every unexpected fault or failure.
Related: Planned Vs Reactive Maintenance
The terms are closely related, but they are not always used in exactly the same way. Reactive maintenance generally describes maintenance initiated after an unexpected problem occurs. Corrective maintenance refers to work carried out to correct a fault or return something to an appropriate working condition. In practice, organisations and software providers sometimes use the terms differently, so it is useful to define what each status or maintenance type means within your own processes.
No. Reactive maintenance is not automatically a bad approach. Some faults are unpredictable, and some lower-risk assets may not justify extensive preventive maintenance. Problems arise when a facilities operation becomes overly dependent on reactive maintenance. If teams are constantly responding to urgent problems, it can become difficult to plan workloads, complete preventive maintenance and investigate why the same problems keep happening. The aim is not necessarily to eliminate reactive maintenance. It is to make sure it is being used appropriately.
Not every maintenance request requires the same response.
A useful prioritisation process considers factors such as:
For example, a minor cosmetic defect and a fault preventing an essential facility from operating should not normally receive the same priority. Clear priority definitions also help staff understand what terms such as urgent, high, medium and low actually mean.
A good maintenance request gives the facilities team enough information to understand and act on the problem.
Useful information can include:
Making fault reporting simple can improve the quality of the information received. For example, QR codes can be placed on assets or in locations so users can scan a code and report a problem from their phone.
A simple reactive maintenance process might look like this:
A consistent process makes it much easier to see what is outstanding and prevents requests from disappearing into emails, messages or conversations.
Start by understanding what is generating it.
Look for patterns such as:
That information can help facilities teams decide whether maintenance schedules need reviewing or whether an asset needs further investigation. The objective should not be to reach zero reactive maintenance. Unexpected problems will still happen. A better goal is to reduce avoidable and repeated reactive work.
The right metrics depend on your facilities operation, but useful measures can include:
Trends are often more useful than a single number.
For example, an increase in reactive jobs associated with one asset could indicate a developing reliability problem worth investigating.
Facilities management software gives teams a central process for reporting, assigning, tracking and recording reactive work.
Instead of maintenance requests arriving through separate emails, calls, messages and spreadsheets, problems can enter one workflow.
FaultFixers helps facilities teams manage reactive maintenance alongside planned maintenance, work orders and assets.
Users can report faults digitally, including through QR codes, while facilities teams can assign work, monitor outstanding jobs and retain maintenance histories.
If your reactive maintenance is currently managed through emails, spreadsheets or paper processes, you can try FaultFixers for free or book a demo to see how it could work in one system.
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