When it comes to Maintenance KPI’s, there is a mind boggling amount of measures available. These can be overwhelming for the people compiling the KPI’s, the work teams and those responsible for KPI analysis. So which KPI metrics do you really need? Read on to uncover the truth about Maintenance KPI Reporting in small to medium sized organizations.

Setting up Maintenance KPI Metrics

So you want to set up some KPI metrics for your maintenance team. The easy thing to do is Google Maintenance KPI’s. However you are presented with literally hundreds of options. The truth is, if you want some easy to understand, easy to analyse maintenance KPI’s there are only 3 that you really need.

1. Schedule Completion

It is important to know if work teams are getting the job done. This KPI simply measures how successful the work team was in getting the job done. This is normally measured in terms of a weekly schedule.

So the work team schedule 500 hours of work to be completed last week. But they only managed to complete 400 hours of that work. So their schedule completion for last week was 400 / 500 hours = 80%. It’s that easy!

Maintenance KPI Metrics schedule completion formula

2. PM Completion

PM’s (Preventive Maintenance) are a vital part of most organisations in the modern age. In fact most organisations will make this their highest priority of work to complete. So it is important to measure how well you work team is at completing the PM program. It is measured exactly the same way as schedule completion, only it is filtered for PM jobs only. You should also include Predictive Maintenance in this PM KPI calculation.

Maintenance KPI Metrics pm completion formula

3. Planned vs Unplanned

One of the biggest reasons for not completing the scheduled work due to breakdowns, or unplanned jobs demanding time from the work teams.Thus it is important to measure the volume of the unplanned work completed. This can be done by simply measuring the number of planned hours worked, compared to the number of unplanned hours worked. Note that the words planned and scheduled are used interchangeably here.

The formula is scheduled hours work / all hours worked. If a work team worked 500 hours in total last week, 300 of these were spent on scheduled work, and 200 hours on breakdowns. Their planned vs unplanned KPI calculation would be 60%.

planned versus unplanned formula

Hitting The Targets

It’s important to set targets for each of the above 3 Maintenance metrics. These should of course be signed off by management as the department objectives, and they can be reviewed and adjusted if necessary. Different industries require different targets, but a starting point could be 80% Planned vs Unplanned, 90% Schedule Completion, 95% PM Completion.

KPI Trends Over Time

These Maintenance KPI’s are more effective if you trend them over time. This is compulsory for KPI monitoring purposes. I recommend you publish the KPI’s for the week, as well as the trend over a period of 12 weeks. 

This will highlight improving or deteriorating performance. This in turn gives management an opportunity to recognise negative trends during KPI analysis, intervene and prevent further deterioration. This process of analysis and improvement is an integral part of effective KPI performance management.

maintenance kpi schedule compliance graph

What Other KPI’s Are Needed?

Your organization may have a good business case to implement more KPI’s. There are so many to choose from, depending on what measures will help your company to achieve their goals. 

When it comes to publishing KPI’s for consumption by the general working public, less is more. 

You are better off publishing only the main 3 KPI’s. This will be easy to digest for the average person, and foster a stronger sense of ownership. Other KPI metrics are better off left for those people responsible for detailed KPI analysis.

User Friendly KPI’s

The trick to successful Maintenance KPI’s is to make them user friendly. Not too much information, and not too complicated. A simple, easy to read KPI dashboard should do the trick nicely. Readers should have a sense of strong performance or poor performance at a glance.

If the work teams understand the KPI’s they are more likely to take ownership and work towards improving performance. Thus the organisation is more likely to benefit from having implemented KPI’s in the first place.

Be a KPI Ninja

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