Wrench Time: The Best Uses of an Interesting Maintenance Metric

Wrench Time: What It Is, Reasons To Track It, and How To Measure It

If you work in maintenance, you know there are seemingly countless ways to measure the performance of your employees and your company. One of these is wrench time.

So what is wrench time, and is it as useful as other maintenance performance metrics?

In this article, we’ll examine:

• The definition of wrench time

• Pros and cons of tracking wrench time

• How to track it

• Causes of low wrench time; and

• How to increase it

We’ll also fill you in on how preventive maintenance software from UpKeep can help you monitor wrench time and much more.

What Is Wrench Time?

Wrench time — also known as tool time — refers to the time an employee spends working with a tool in their hand. Or to be more technical, it’s a maintenance metric measuring the time technicians spend working on a piece of equipment as part of the total time to complete a job.

Wrench time can be measured by:

• The individual job

• Weekly average

• Monthly average; or

• Quarterly average

Effective use of wrench time as a metric should focus on letting management know about potential red flags (with equipment or processes) that should be investigated. It can also identify frustrations and obstacles that keep work from being done.

What Wrench Time Doesn’t Measure

Wrench time can be an effective measurement tool, but it doesn’t tell you:

• The time it takes to get instructions, parts, or tools

• Travel associated with maintenance tasks

• If workers are performing the job on time; or

• What the quality of work is

Wrench time helps you measure the work that was performed, but it doesn't tell you how accurate or effective that work was. That’s why some businesses don’t even measure wrench time and instead focus on other maintenance KPIs.

3 Reasons To Track Wrench Time

#1: To Track Improvements in Productivity

A more productive maintenance team has a higher wrench time percentage. Technicians do more hands-on maintenance work rather than waiting for parts and work requests to come in. However, you can also track increases in completed work orders to measure improvements in productivity. 

Doc Palmer, a professional maintenance planner, says that by implementing a preventive maintenance program, “a plant completing 1,000 work orders per month can complete 1,570 work orders per month with the same workforce.”

#2: To Identify Time-Intensive Tasks

Seeing how long it takes for technicians to complete work orders is insightful for improving reliability and scheduling. 

For instance, if you notice that a non-critical piece of machinery requires time-intensive PMs and repairs — more so than a critical asset — you can consider replacing the asset or rolling back PMs. Maybe you schedule PMs less frequently or only perform maintenance when the asset breaks down.

#3: For Accounting Purposes

Tracking wrench time and other time dedicated to completing a project on a specific asset can improve the accuracy of bookkeeping. 

For instance, some capital assets require large repairs that can be depreciated. When technicians track time, this time can be assigned a monetary value and be depreciated along with parts, contracted labor, and other resources needed to make the repair.

One reason you should definitely not track wrench time is to check whether technicians are doing their job. This creates distrust and a stressful work environment. 

So, if you decide to track wrench time, it’s important to articulate to technicians why the organization tracks wrench time — not to micromanage but for one or more of the aforementioned reasons.

3 Downsides of Measuring Wrench Time

#1: Risk of Upsetting People

One of the primary reasons you’ll want to be careful with measuring wrench time is that it can easily upset your technicians. It’s easy for them to see it as a sign that you don’t trust them or that you feel they aren’t working hard enough.

Additionally, since wrench time studies measure the average amount of time your technicians spend with their tools, it could make underperformers look better while underrepresenting the efforts of higher achievers.

#2: Wrench Time Doesn’t Account for Other Important Tasks

While part of a maintenance technician’s job is to use tools to maintain equipment, they have many other duties as well, including:

• Diagnosing problems

• Root cause analysis

• On-site planning

These tasks are often left out of wrench time analysis, which means the results of your study may be misconstrued to show (falsely) that your team isn’t busy.

#3: Potentially Misleading Results

On top of not representing important tasks, wrench time itself may be misleading if it’s used improperly or misinterpreted.

For instance, if a task takes a long time to complete, it will reflect a higher-than-average wrench time percentage. However, if a technician takes longer than they should to complete a task, they are actually less productive, even though a higher wrench time would be reported. In this case, wrench time measures how much work was done regardless of whether it was effective.

These potential drawbacks don’t necessarily mean you should avoid wrench time studies altogether. However, they do show how important it is to use wrench time wisely. It’s meant to help you find obstacles in daily work routines and see how they might be resolved.

Tip: Treat wrench time as a lagging indicator that shows a symptom of potential issues, not a leading indicator that precedes problems in and of itself.

How To Track Wrench Time

There are a few different ways to track wrench time and perform wrench time studies.

Work Sampling

According to Ron Moore, the author of many maintenance management books, this is when:

“An analyst with a clipboard and a chart broken into 10 to 15-minute intervals observes technicians and determines whether or not they are working on the job. Not working typically has to do with traveling to and from the job site; waiting for parts, permits, access, and tools; waiting for start-up checks; and taking part in other activities.” 

Work sampling is typically used to determine whether productivity has increased.

Day in the Life Of (DILO)

This is when a reliability consultant follows the activities of a single technician in a single day. DILO is beneficial for discovering specific details about barriers to productivity because the consultant has the ability to ask the technician questions about their likes and dislikes. 

DILO is more targeted and qualitative, while work sampling is more broad and quantitative.

Within the Work Order

Many organizations have technicians tracking wrench time for every work order with a mobile CMMS. With this software, technicians can easily start and stop tracking wrench time within a work order. 

If you can educate your technicians on why you track wrench time — and get them to accurately track it — you’ll have a wealth of additional data for improving maintenance operations.

Regardless of how you track wrench time, in every case, it’s important to articulate to technicians that wrench time is tracked or studied to remove annoying barriers for them — not to see whether they’re working.

5 Causes of Low Wrench Time

As you measure wrench time, you’ll likely find your technicians’ work routines interrupted by various obstacles. Some common causes of low wrench time include the following.

#1: Waiting on Parts or Equipment

The time it takes technicians to secure the parts and equipment needed to complete work orders is time they aren’t spending working. If parts aren’t readily available, it slows down maintenance work processes.

For instance, if a technician has to wait to check out a specific tool from the storeroom, that would reduce wrench time. Your maintenance planner or scheduler should make sure the needed tool is available as soon as the work order is assigned.

#2: Excess Travel Time

Traveling from one site to another often eats up a lot of time, but some travel time is unavoidable. However, in many cases, it can get excessive.

Often, that time might result from poor scheduling. Technicians end up zigzagging throughout a facility moving from one job to the next, traveling more miles than they strictly need to in order to complete everything. As such, work order assignments should take asset location into account.

In addition, technicians often have to travel back and forth between the worksite and the storeroom in order to secure tools, parts, schematics, and so forth. This is ultimately the result of poor planning, and it wastes time.

#3: Lockout-Tagout Inefficiencies

Ideally, when technicians arrive at a worksite, it should be shut down and ready for them. There shouldn’t be any waiting time here (or any disputes with production crews), but it is often the case that there is a delay.

Many times, this results from poor communication with operations. If they don’t know in advance that they need to have a machine locked down for inspection or repairs, it will typically cost extra time once the maintenance crew arrives.

#4: Reactive Mindset

Many times inefficiencies result from a reactive mindset, whether that’s on the part of your maintenance team or your production process. If maintenance crews are only reserved for repairing equipment when it breaks down, they’ll be highly underutilized, and that will be reflected in a low wrench time percentage.

This is not to say that the sole purpose of shifting to a proactive mindset is to make sure your maintenance team has enough to do. The goal is to have your maintenance team support reliability, which is ultimately a more effective use of their time than waiting for something to go wrong.

#5: Poor Maintenance Planning

Most of these causes of low wrench time ultimately come down to poor maintenance planning. It takes effective planning practices to make sure spare parts and tools are available, equipment is taken offline on time, and travel is kept to a minimum.

Shifting from a reactive mindset to a proactive one requires effective maintenance planning practices to support it.

4 Ways To Increase Wrench Time

With a solid understanding of what causes low wrench time, it becomes more apparent how you can improve it in your facility. It largely comes down to improving your maintenance planning.

#1: Improve MRO Storeroom Management

Effective MRO storeroom management entails having the right spares and tools in stock in sufficient quantities. It also involves making sure those parts and tools are available when needed. Doing so helps prevent delays and thereby improves wrench time.

#2: Coordinate With Operations

To avoid a situation where your maintenance team has to wait for an asset to be taken offline, you’ll need to coordinate with operations. Clear communication with operating crews on when equipment needs to be locked out and why can help expedite PMs.

#3: Create Repeatable Procedures for Work Orders

Repeatable procedures help standardize processes, including work orders. Maintenance checklists can play a major role in making sure your technicians:

• Have the right tools for each job.

• Complete work orders quickly.

• Know how to complete each task.

Where possible, your procedures should be written for the lowest skill level among your personnel. That way, you’ll have more flexibility on work order assignments.

Tip: It can take some time to train personnel to use checklists. However, creating a “checklist culture” is worth the time it takes to implement.

#4: Map Out Your Facility

You likely already have a floor plan for your facility. If you don’t have a copy with asset locations marked out, it may be worthwhile to draw one up. 

Doing so can help your maintenance team account for travel times when scheduling work. By planning routes and assignments based on asset location, you can improve wrench time by minimizing travel time.

UpKeep Can Help You Keep Track of and Improve Wrench Time

It’s important to remember that wrench time is nothing more or less than how many hours your workforce is spending with their tools working on equipment. It doesn’t measure whether that work is effective, and it doesn’t tell you how reliable your facility is.

That said, it can be worth measuring when you need insight into the obstacles your technicians face each day or when you need to account for working hours spent on maintenance tasks. Done well, it acts as one of the measuring sticks you can use to gauge your facility’s productivity.

Simply tracking wrench time will not improve it. The best way to improve wrench time is to enhance maintenance planning and scheduling. In other words, you need less reactive maintenance and more preventive or predictive maintenance. Hiring a maintenance planner and using PM scheduling software can help you do this.

UpKeep’s intelligent and intuitive preventive maintenance software helps today’s maintenance professionals prevent asset breakdowns before they happen. Achieve the full useful life of your equipment while tracking and improving wrench time with UpKeep’s preventive maintenance tools.

Start a free trial today, or schedule a tour to see how it works.