What are the Best KPIs to Track the Performance of my Maintenance Team?

Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) make it easy to measure a facility's progress versus world-class facilities - without these figures, organizations lack a way of understanding their specific facility's effectiveness.

Fortunately, there are a ton of great metrics to track (and do so easily with CMMS software and other tools) to paint a picture of a facility's overall health. The following are some examples of metrics that can help characterize the team’s performance:

1. Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP)

Any facility with an active preventive maintenance (PM) program should be tracking its PMP.

At an essential level, an organization's PMP is the ratio of planned to reactive maintenance activities. PMP can be determined by measuring the total amount of maintenance hours, then figuring out how many of those hours are planned.

Baseline PMP should be about 50% - however, a world-class PMP is 80% or higher (meaning that 80% of a facility's maintenance tasks are planned, not reactive).

2. Response Time (Repairs and Work Orders)

Tracking response time, either regarding repairs or work orders, is a great way to understand your maintenance team's effectiveness.

Response time makes for easy goal-setting as well - an organization can hold meetings with its maintenance managers to target ideal response times and identify solutions for under-performing areas.

A similar metric is time to repair (how long repairs take to complete), which gives you an idea of how capable your maintenance team is regarding quickly getting equipment back up and running.

3. Reactive Maintenance Tasks by Machine

An organization should have an idea of its overall reactive maintenance situation, but it's also critical to track reactive tasks on a per asset basis.

This allows you to do a few different things: first, it allows you to track particularly problematic equipment and identify voids in a PM program to prevent reactive maintenance in the first place. Tracking reactive maintenance per asset can also give you a good idea of training and knowledge deficits - if the reasons for reactive maintenance are operator errors or poorly performed maintenance, this is an opportunity to fix those issues.

4. Schedule Compliance

Schedule compliance measures the timeliness of the completion of work orders. When running proactive maintenance strategies, it is important to comply with the planned schedules to maximize maintenance efforts. Deviations from acceptable schedule compliance values need to be investigated to identify and address the root cause. Suggested benchmark performance for schedule compliance is greater than 90%.

5. Maintenance Backlog

A maintenance backlog can be seen as a “to-do list” for the maintenance staff. This can be measured in man-hours, days, weeks, etc. A healthy maintenance backlog is not necessarily an empty maintenance backlog, as an empty task list may suggest that you are overstaffed. Planning activities that allow for 2 weeks of backlog per technician can be considered normal. On the other hand, 4 weeks backlog or more might require additional resources or at least some overtime work. The amount of maintenance backlog should be accounted for in maintenance planning, and priorities of how to get through the backlog should be set.

6. Maintenance Overtime

Unplanned work within the plant is a reality, and most of the time it can be addressed without issues by working overtime. To gauge if your team is working too much overtime, it would help to compare the maintenance overtime as a percentage of the total maintenance time. Suggested benchmark performance for maintenance overtime is less than 5%.

While suggested values to indicate healthy performance are available, note that care must be taken to ensure that the data being analyzed are as accurate as possible, to begin with. Performing root cause analysis procedures is then the next step to identify whether deviations can be addressed immediately.

Conclusion

The right mindset is important when coming up with performance metrics. Including the team in setting KPIs would help give an understanding of the current state of the plant. Promoting a healthy and inclusive working culture helps to keep the team motivated to perform more effectively.

There are tons of metrics to track, but these are important ones for nearly every facility because they deal with the most common issues in facility management.