The benefit of performing  periodic maintenance activities is that it doesn’t require additional equipment to decide on when equipment needs to be serviced. Initial costs to come up with time-based schedules are very minimal. A periodic maintenance program would rely more on historical data and analysis rather than additional physical devices that can incur more costs.

The downside to performing purely time-based maintenance is that there is a risk of performing unnecessary activities. It is estimated that up to 30% of time-based preventive tasks are done too frequently.

Another challenge of solely performing periodic maintenance is that failure due to random events can occur. There are certain breakdowns that are not dependent on time and can therefore occur before the scheduled maintenance check.