The industry consensus is that reactive maintenance costs three to five times more than planned maintenance. In African mining, the multiplier is higher because the supply chain is longer, the spares are harder to source, and the regulatory consequences are steeper.
A primary crusher down for one hour at a Witwatersrand gold operation does not cost one hour of lost output. It costs the cascading starvation of every downstream process: the mill, the flotation cell, the thickener. Add the emergency procurement of a part that was available two weeks ago at standard lead time and is now available tomorrow at three times the price.
The math is not complicated. An operation running 40 hours of unplanned downtime per month at $250 per hour is losing $120,000 per year to downtime alone. Add the emergency procurement premium, the overtime labour, the regulatory fines for missed inspections, and the insurance exposure from undocumented maintenance, and the real number is significantly higher.
The published maintenance literature consistently reports that a well-implemented CMMS reduces unplanned downtime materially in the first year — the ranges vary by study, by sector and by how much of the programme is actually adopted, and we would rather scope yours honestly than quote you someone else's number as if it were ours. Run the calculator on the pricing page with your own downtime hours and your own hourly cost, then argue with the assumptions.
The question is not whether a CMMS pays for itself. It is how quickly. For most operations we work with, the answer is measured in weeks, not months.