Imagine you’re running a department of a manufacturing facility and think your maintenance team is doing a good job. Do you think you can derive effective results based on mere assumptions?
Absolutely not! There has to be a definite method to measure your performance.
In the world of maintenance, you can evaluate your team’s performance by defining and tracking maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) and maintenance performance metrics.
More often than not, the management of an organization may only be interested in knowing about the maintenance costs. However, that does not provide any actionable insights into the performance of your maintenance team. To thoroughly evaluate efficiency, you need to go a bit deeper.
Each department should have a clear set of goals, and the best approach to measure the efficiency of your maintenance strategy is to define maintenance KPIs and use maintenance metrics as benchmarks to ensure you’re on the right track.
In this blog post, we will discover more about maintenance KPIs and metrics and how you can measure them.
What is a maintenance KPI?
A maintenance KPI is a benchmark that is used to measure the performance of a maintenance team or individual team member in achieving their goals.
Essentially, maintenance KPIs are specific targets, such as reducing downtime by 25 percent. This particular KPI is used to monitor progress in achieving larger goals such as cost reduction, downtime prevention, or enhancement of machine reliability.
A maintenance KPI brings together a metric (such as downtime) and a benchmark (such as a decrease of 25 percent) to quantitatively measure success in accomplishing a specific goal, such as downtime prevention.
The most common maintenance KPIs include maintenance costs, mean time between failure (MTBF), unscheduled downtime, reactive maintenance work hours, and work order cycle time.
Why are maintenance KPIs important?
As per a 2021 Plant Engineering study, 53% of companies spend more than 30 hours a week on maintenance. This proves most companies surveyed spend a major chunk of time on maintenance, which comes at a huge cost. This necessitates the companies to set maintenance KPIs such as maintenance costs to reduce costs.
Maintenance KPIs are quantifiable goals that provide you with quick updates on the progress of a certain project. They represent the outcome that you are aiming for. An effective KPI stands true to the SMART acronym of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
So, to answer “why are maintenance KPIs important”, we would simply say that maintenance managers depend on KPIs to know whether their teams are meeting their performance expectations or to find out reasons why they may not be able to.
Examples of maintenance KPIs
Let’s discuss a basic example of a maintenance KPI. Suppose your organization’s primary goal is to reduce costs by a specific amount. Now, maintenance plays a significant role as it impacts aspects such as maintenance costs and production waste.
When you assign numbers to these aspects, they turn into KPIs. This could entail setting a goal to reduce maintenance costs by up to 10 percent or to reduce production waste by up to 15 percent.
Here are some examples of maintenance KPIs that a maintenance manager may consider setting:
- Enhance labor efficiency for scheduled maintenance activities by 20 percent in six months
- Decrease unexpected downtime by 25 percent within the next twelve months
- Achieve over 90 percent accuracy in inventory management within four months
- Reduce work requests by 30 percent in the next six months
- Reduce energy usage by 15 percent by the end of the year
However, it is noteworthy that defining your maintenance KPIs is only the first step towards progress.
Maintenance teams can break down KPIs into more detail such as defining a plan of action and setting relevant maintenance metrics for monitoring progress and milestones.
Picking an example from the list above, let’s suppose your equipment has undergone reactive maintenance due to unexpected downtime, and now your goal is to decrease this downtime by 25 percent. Here’s what you need to do:
Plan of action: Use a proactive preventive maintenance method to get your equipment back in optimal condition
Maintenance metrics: Track metrics such as planned maintenance percentage, preventive maintenance compliance, and number of work requests for improvement.
Milestones: Thoroughly review these maintenance metrics after every three months
The key is to choose the right metrics. Given there are various factors that can impact each of your maintenance KPIs, it is important to:
- Identify underperforming factors
- Define actions you will take to improve those factors
- Specify metrics to track the effectiveness of those actions
Also Read: What is Scheduled Maintenance? Examples, Benefits, and More
What are maintenance performance metrics?
Maintenance performance metrics are measurements that provide insights into your facility’s daily operations, offering detailed information on the performance of maintenance teams and assets. Metrics serve as a valuable tool to assess the impact of these activities on the overall objectives of your maintenance department.
Maintenance managers can use metrics to measure daily operations against their target numbers. Also, using these metrics, they can quickly highlight areas of strength, areas for growth and improvement, and potential opportunities.
Maintenance metrics provide a better understanding of how routine tasks align with larger goals, enabling better oversight, and improvement of maintenance operations.
Some of the common maintenance metrics include Time to Repair (MTTR), Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEEE).
Effective maintenance teams are able to analyze which metrics serve as an accurate measure of their success, which only play the role of contributors to success, and which should be discarded altogether.
What is the difference between maintenance KPIs and maintenance performance metrics?
Many often confuse maintenance KPIs with maintenance performance metrics and assume they’re the same. However, there’s a significant difference between the two.
Maintenance KPIs are numbers or targets that connect organizational progress to maintenance performance whereas maintenance performance metrics link maintenance performance with maintenance actions.
In other words, maintenance KPIs are benchmarks that signify goal success, while maintenance metrics are the data points on which these benchmarks are based.
For example, your goal is to improve an asset’s reliability and you’ve identified uptime to be the best metric to measure your goal. Now, you will set a KPI for your team, which can be to increase uptime by 25 percent by the end of next year.
5 essential maintenance metrics to track
For maintenance goals to be effective, it is important that they align with the overall objectives of the organization. While goals can differ based on several factors such as size, type, and location of the business, the majority of the maintenance departments can benefit from tracking the following maintenance metrics:
1. Equipment downtime
Unplanned downtimes are quite costly for asset-intensive industries such as manufacturing. The International Society of Automation (ISA) estimates that factories lose 5-20 percent of productive capacity during each downtime incident. By regularly tracking downtime, maintenance teams can create a baseline for evaluating the effectiveness of activities across all maintenance departments.
To reduce downtime, it is recommended to schedule critical assets for preventive maintenance keeping the manufacturer’s guidelines in mind. This reduces unexpected breakdowns and extends asset lifespan.
2. Maintenance backlogs and overtime
Maintenance backlogs can play a pivotal role in recruiting maintenance technicians. Regularly tracking maintenance time and cost data will let maintenance departments know whether a department is overstaffed or understaffed at any given point.
Excessive work orders may indicate a need to hire more staff whereas no backlogs could mean there is an overstaffed team that needs to be trimmed.
Managers can monitor overtime to assess if the department is relying too much on reactive maintenance. Excessive dependence on reactive maintenance can lead to technician burnout, increased maintenance costs, costly downtime, and decreased productivity.
3. Asset performance metrics
You can track the effectiveness of your maintenance activities with the help of asset performance metrics that are mentioned as follows:
- Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): This metric denotes the amount of time it takes before an asset experiences breakdown. It measures the time between failures for repairable assets. You can optimize your maintenance strategy and enhance productivity by increasing your MTBF for critical assets.
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): This metric refers to the average time maintenance teams take to repair a broken-down asset. It includes the diagnosis of the asset and its repair and recovery time. MTTR is crucial for identifying and eradicating inefficiencies in the maintenance process.
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): This metric is used to evaluate the overall performance of the facility. It measures the overall productivity of facilities, equipment, and processes. It is important to consider equipment availability, performance efficiency, and product quality while measuring OEE. It helps determine areas of waste and areas where enhancements are needed to set SOPs.
It is advisable to determine the underlying causes for poor asset performance metrics, investigate SOPs for potential roadblocks, gather feedback from maintenance staff, and evaluate communication systems for further improvements.
4. Operational metrics
Key operational metrics include planned maintenance percentage (PMP) and schedule compliance. PMP measures the percentage of your total maintenance time dedicated to planned maintenance. A higher PMP indicates your maintenance planning process is effective and your teams aren’t relying too much on reactive maintenance.
Also known as preventive maintenance compliance, the schedule compliance metric is used to measure the percentage of PM activities completed as per the schedule. Similar to PMP, a higher schedule compliance indicates efficient PM planning and scheduling.
5. Maintenance cost as a percent of RAV
You can use this metric to track your replacement asset value (RAV) and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of your maintenance operations. RAV indicates the cost to replace a production plant and its existing assets at present.
You need to include the facility and all the physical assets within it needing routine maintenance while calculating RAV. However, including working capital such as raw materials while calculating RAV is not recommended.
You can also track other maintenance metrics such as replacement parts inventory, asset uptime and availability, and the number of workplace incidents, accidents, and rework requests.
How to measure maintenance metrics
The right tools, processes, and people are needed to effectively measure maintenance metrics. The right tools help you gather the numbers and calculate the metrics. The right processes convert data into information and then strategies. Lastly, the right people help your organization use the tools, execute the processes, and implement correct strategies.
Computerized maintenance management (CMMS software) or preventive maintenance software helps you gather data from all assets, work orders, and purchases while facilitating the generation of automated reports that lead to informed decision-making. Advanced CMMS solution helps maintenance teams streamline, measure, and perform their tasks efficiently.
Final thoughts
Maintenance metrics are essential for an organization. Without proper infrastructure – equipment, teams, and other essentials – they can remain unmeasured and unused. Therefore, it is important to develop a robust system comprising experts, methods, and tools to completely leverage the potential of data. This will empower your team to gain maximum benefit from the maintenance metrics and boost productivity.
