Your Preventive Maintenance Schedule Is Quietly Killing Your Margin

Let's be honest about how traditional maintenance works in most shops. We operate in one of two modes:

1.  Reactive ("Run-to-Failure"): This is chaos. A machine breaks, production stops, and everyone scrambles. It’s the most expensive way to run a business, period. You pay for overtime labor, expedited parts, and lost revenue.

2.  Preventive (Calendar-Based): This feels more responsible, but it’s incredibly inefficient. You replace a spindle bearing every 2,000 hours because that's what the manual says. The problem? That bearing might have had another 1,000 hours of perfectly good life left in it. You just threw away a good part and paid a technician to do it.

This "just-in-case" approach to maintenance is a drag on your finances. It inflates your COGS with unnecessary parts and labor, ties up cash in your spare parts inventory, and still doesn’t prevent every failure. Why? Because a calendar doesn't know if you were running tough-to-machine alloys last month or if a new operator is pushing the machine harder. It’s a guess. A costly one.