How do Preventative Maintenance Programs affect R&M Costs and Downtime?

Facilities management requires strategic decisions about where to invest your operations dollars. Which investments will make the biggest impact on your operations budget? Your bottom line? Your customer experience?

Some facilities spending gives an easy-to-calculate return on investment (ROI). For example, if it costs exponentially more to repair a piece of equipment than to replace it, deciding where to invest is a fairly straightforward decision.

However, other areas of facilities management, such as preventative maintenance (PM) programs, present more complicated questions. Should your organization invest in PM activities, regularly scheduling in-house or contract service providers to perform activities on equipment? Accounting for the cost of these service hours, how does PM affect your bottom line? Is ROI the same across the board, or does it vary across asset groups? At the end of the day, is preventative maintenance really worth it?

As a leading Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) solution for facilities management professionals, Ecotrak has access to a unique data set that can help inform many of these questions. Our team mined through nearly a decade of anonymized asset records to analyze how Preventative Maintenance programs impact repair & maintenance costs, as well as equipment downtime. Here, we share some of our results and takeaways.

Methodology

Our PM data set is based on customer asset records between January 1st, 2016 through June 30th, 2025, In total, this data covered roughly 1 million assets across multiple asset groups. Data was pulled from a number of different industries, including quick service restaurants, food service, convenience, retail, grocery, and others.

We used this data to calculate overall Return on Maintenance Spend (ROMS) for specific equipment and also generalized asset groups like cooking equipment or HVAC.

Repair and maintenance (R&M) cost is measured by considering two different buckets of expenses:

1. For businesses that don’t leverage PM:

Change in repair costs over time / Initial repair costs

2. For businesses that deploy PM:

Change in (PM costs + repair costs) over time / Initial (PM costs + repair costs)

The goal of our methodology is to explore whether proactive maintenance reduces expensive repairs enough to improve overall spend. If there is a reduction in total spending over time, this helps show that the maintenance strategy, whether reactive or proactive, is driving cost savings.

Preventative Maintenance Impact on Repair & Maintenance Costs

According to Ecotrak’s data, when PM is implemented, there is a small increase in overall R&M cost, on average about 10%. This means that performing PM does not reduce the total R&M cost; instead, the overall expenses increase slightly to pay for the program.

However, when individual assets are broken out, some assets display clear positive savings. In particular, for many high-usage pieces of equipment, while costly repairs were still required, the average cost after PM programs decreased.

The table below outlines the return on investment (ROI) for costs before and after PM programs are set up, broken out into equipment categories.

Preventative Maintenance Impact on Equipment Downtime

Looking at Ecotrak’s data about equipment downtime, PM created an increased mean change in downtime (the mean is the average of a group of values). However, the data also showed a small decrease in median downtime (the median is the middle value in a list of values). This paints a mixed picture of the impact of PM on downtime.

However, several specific assets in the data showed major reductions in downtime when PM is implemented. For example, common cooking equipment such as combioven, food processor, grill/flat top range, and slicer showed anywhere from 100% to 15,000% reduction in downtime. Again, our data shows that PM appears to generally reduce downtime the most for high-use, critical pieces of equipment.

The table here details the ROI of preventative maintenance, in terms of downtime hours, broken out by core asset groups.

Preventative Maintenance Takeaways and Recommendations

How can this data inform your overall PM strategy?

• On the one hand, preventative maintenance doesn’t consistently reduce costs across the board. Implementing PM can add service expenses to the budget.

• However, our data shows that PM can still provide benefits. PM means that your organization may still encounter costly repairs, but you may not have them as frequently.

• In terms of downtime, for high-priority assets, PM can clearly and significantly reduce downtime and support smoother operations. The downtime ROI is highest for high-usage equipment where failure is costly.

• Takeaway: Target PM investment to focus on high-impact assets that have a large impact on your core business offering or your customer experience. By focusing the PM budget on these assets, you can optimize uptime and ownership cost over the long-term.

And while the slight increase in R&M or downtime cost may be surprising for facilities managers, other benefits from PM programs may not be accounted for in the numbers. For example, improvements in asset life and functionality can benefit the customer experience, helping support long-term revenue generation. A PM program may also positively impact your organization’s staff bandwidth, allowing maintenance activities to occur on a more predictable schedule rather than requiring urgent “fire drill” service activities.

Ecotrak’s data shows that preventative maintenance is an investment in your asset fleet, and the ROI may look different for every piece of equipment. As your organization evolves, how can your preventative maintenance program evolve with it?