Preventive maintenance always involves effort, both in its planning and execution.
Nevertheless, there are many reasons why you must or should perform preventive maintenance in your company, including the following:
- Legal requirements: Legislation on plant safety or industrial health and safety may require you to inspect or maintain your technical system regularly.
- Quality assurance: The quality of a product depends largely on the condition of the production facility in which it is manufactured.
- Fewer malfunctions: One of the most important tasks in maintenance planning is to keep a production facility continuously available over the long term. Effective preventive maintenance helps ensure that a technical system does not fail and reduces unnecessary costs arising from repairs, system replacements, or production downtimes.
- Environmental protection requirements: Effective preventive maintenance can help prevent system breakdowns that lead to environmental impacts.
- Manufacturer recommendations: Your technical system’s manufacturer may recommend certain procedures to ensure that the system always runs optimally.
- Improved capacity utilization: Preventive maintenance provides a work list that helps you use your workshops more consistently, for example, because you have fewer breakdown-related repair tasks to handle.
- Lower maintenance costs: Whether preventative maintenance can decrease your maintenance costs is debatable and depends largely on whether you’ve already reached the optimum intensity of preventive maintenance.
Whether you're using SAP S/4HANA or another logistics system, preventive maintenance and repair costs are inversely proportional and depend on the intensity of preventive maintenance (see figure below), as follows:
- The higher the intensity level of preventive maintenance, the higher the preventive maintenance costs.
- The higher the intensity level of preventive maintenance, the lower the costs for repairs.
At the optimum intensity level, W0, the overall costs of plant maintenance are minimal. Follow-up costs that may arise from inadequate preventive maintenance (for example, restarting costs) are not included in this cost consideration, since they are considered opportunity costs only.
There are three different types of preventive maintenance (see next figure), as follows:
- Time-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered after a certain period of time has expired (for example, every six months).
- Performance-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered when a certain performance threshold is reached (for example, every 10,000 miles).
- Condition-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered when a certain diagnostic value has not been reached or has been exceeded (for example, a pressure lower than 15 bar or temperature higher than 85°C).
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Plant Maintenance with SAP S/4HANA: Business User Guide by Karl Liebstückel and Markus Seidl. Prof. Dr. Liebstückel was a professor of information management and business software at the Technical University Würzburg-Schweinfurt in Germany, and he has approximately 40 years of experience in the field of enterprise asset management. Markus is a chief solution architect at SAP with more than 25 years of experience in the field of enterprise asset management.
This post was originally published 9/2026.