What Are Maintenance KPIs and Why Should You Be Tracking Them?

Tracking your team’s performance is crucial because, no matter how much progress they make, there will be nothing to show for it. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are helpful metrics that help you measure the progress made toward organizational goals. Each aspect of a business has a different corresponding KPI you can track. 

Maintenance KPIs help assess the performance of maintenance technicians, operations, and processes. You can use them to measure efficiency, asset downtime, inventory management, workplace safety and compliance, maintenance expenditure, and asset performance. In this guide, we will delve deeper into KPIs and go over some of the reasons why you should start tracking them. 

Why Should You Track KPIs? 

Tracking KPIs can help your team celebrate their wins, identify areas where they need to focus, and take complete responsibility for the tasks assigned to them. Other reasons for tracking performance metrics include: 

• Helps you assess how effective your marketing and sales strategies are 

• Allows you to hold your teams accountable for the goals set, using data to reflect their performance 

• Improves goal setting by connecting them to measurable metrics and making them more focused and actionable 

• Links daily operations and larger goals by generating concrete metrics to analyze 

How Do KPIs Differ From Maintenance Metrics? 

Maintenance metrics measure what is actually happening in your day-to-day maintenance activities, while KPIs represent the targets you are trying to hit. 

For example, you might track how many corrective maintenance work orders your team completes each week. If your goal is 20, and your team completes 15, the metric shows they are slightly below target. In this case, the maintenance metric would be the actual result (15 orders completed) and the KPI would be the target (20 corrective maintenance orders). 

Put simply, metrics show what happened, while KPIs show what should happen. 

How to Get Started with KPI Tracking? 

Here are four simple, actionable steps you can take to get started with maintenance KPI tracking: 

• Set actionable goals: The first step in tracking KPIs is to establish measurable goals that align with your organization's overall strategy and objectives. One way is to set ‘SMART’ goals. According to this system, the goals you set should be:  
• Specific 
• Measurable 
• Achievable 
• Relevant 
• Time-bound 

By creating goals that are ‘specific,’ ‘measurable,’ ‘achievable,’ ‘relevant,’ and ‘time-bound,’ you set yourself up for success with KPIs that help you determine if your team is reaching critical business goals.  

• Choose metrics that correspond with your goals: After defining your goals, select KPIs that directly align with those objectives. Since KPIs serve as performance indicators, choosing the right ones is vital for accurately measuring progress. You can track one or more KPIs, as long as each of them is relevant. Tracking metrics for the sake of it can be counterproductive. 

• Identify a system to track KPIs: After defining your goals and deciding which KPIs to monitor, the next step is to identify a reliable system to track them. Without proper organization, you cannot effectively analyze KPI data or derive meaningful insights. 

Many organizations use KPI dashboards to generate, visualize, and evaluate key metrics. These tools not only make data accessible to everyone but also automate tracking to reduce manual effort and errors. 

• Monitor KPIs over time and edit your system: As you monitor KPIs over time, you can use the insights they offer to make data-driven decisions. KPIs reveal different operational trends across different timeframes, so make sure to review specific metrics daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, based on your objectives.  

Regularly sharing these results with your team, as well as external stakeholders, helps you make more informed and strategic decisions. These could mean adjusting your team's priorities, redefining organizational goals, or identifying new KPIs altogether. 

Which KPIs Should You Track? 

While the answer, of course, depends on your team’s specific goals, listed below are some useful metrics you should consider tracking: 

• Equipment downtime = (Total downtime hours / Total operating hours) × 100 

• Overall equipment effectiveness = Availability x Performance x Quality 

• Maintenance technician productivity = (Productive maintenance hours / Total maintenance hours) × 100 

• Work order completion rate = (Completed work orders / Total work orders) × 100 

• Maintenance backlog = (Total pending maintenance work / Total available maintenance hours) × 100 

• Reactive maintenance percentage = (Reactive maintenance hours / Total maintenance hours) x 100 

• Planned maintenance percentage = (Planned maintenance hours / Total maintenance hours) x 100 

• Mean time between failures = Total Operating Time / Number of Failures 

• Mean time to repair = Total repair time / Number of repairs 

Conclusion 

Tracking KPIs is an effective way to assess your team’s performance and improve business operations. But make sure to select relevant metrics to track and share the data with your teammates. This way, everyone can be on the same page and work together toward performing better, instead of being told what to do differently without data-backed reasons.   

The article has been provided and sponsored by David Wade.