As a business professional, uncovering new opportunities for performance improvements is always something that should be a top priority. But at the same time, these improvements don’t reveal themselves based on gut instinct alone. The only way to know how you could be doing better involves learning more about what you’re currently doing in the first place. That means diving deep into your people, your policies and your procedures by way of your CMMS. (Don’t know what is CMMS? checkout out the link of our guide)
If you really want to do everything from improve performance to reduce downtime, there are a few key performance indicators that you’ll absolutely want to monitor moving forward. Separately, they’re all important. Together, they paint a vivid picture about where you are, how you got there and what changes you need to make to strengthen and reinforce the foundation of your organization moving forward.
Open Work Orders
This is one of those CMMS program key performance indicators that may seem simple at first… but in reality, it can actually tell you a great deal.
By tracking the total number of open work orders that you have at any given moment, you’re doing more than just identifying what needs to be done. You can better uncover trends and patterns that may have otherwise went undiscovered, too.
Tracking open work orders (along with the time spent working on those orders and other factors) can help tell you why your maintenance technicians are constantly working overtime, for example. You won’t just know that they are – you’ll know exactly why. You’ll be able to get to the bottom of not the symptom but the disease, so to speak. You’ll be able to see if it’s due to staffing inefficiencies, problems with your current standard operating procedures, the fact that they always need to drop what they’re doing and handle emergency requests and much, much more.
You’ll also be able to see your proactive versus your reactive maintenance efforts. How many work orders are related to planned, preventive maintenance versus unplanned? Why is that the case? What are your people doing about it? Finally, you’ll be able to know. But more than anything, it’ll give you a chance to look at the situation in this level of detail WITHOUT spending hours searching for the information or trying to piece it together on your own. This then lets you look at your overall maintenance programs within the larger context of worker productivity.
Mean Time to Repair
Mean Time to Repair, also known as MTTR, is a KPI that represents how long a piece of equipment is out of production during a failure. If a particular asset does go offline, you can turn to this KPI to help get a better idea of how long the situation will last – and you can also track the ripple effect that this will create along the way.
By paying closer attention to Mean Time to Repair, you put yourself in a better position to understand your needs in terms of staffing, inventory management and other important issues. Based on the MTTR, you also have more actionable data that you can use to make faster, more efficient decisions in terms of “should I repair this asset once again, or is it finally time to replace it?” That type of insight is critical to help a business better align its assets with its own long-term goals.
But in the end, what it really does is give you a better idea of how well you and your teams are responding to repairs and equipment problems. If this number continues to climb for a variety of the assets under your control, it’s a major indicator that there is a problem somewhere else within your organization that deserves your full attention.
Mean Time Between Failures
Also commonly referred to as MTBF for short, Mean Time Between Failures describes exactly what it sounds like – the amount of time that spans between instances of failure during the operation of a system. Especially when you’re talking about pieces of equipment or other assets that are critical to your organization’s survival, this KPI is a great way to dive deeper into the overall performance of said asset.
If you know the MTBF for an asset, you essentially know everything. You’re in a better position to determine the frequency at which that asset should be inspected, for example. If you know how often something is going offline you also know why, which means that you can take more appropriate preventive actions as well. All of this can help reduce unexpected failures, which eliminates the risk of underperforming as well.
Preventive Maintenance Compliance
Finally and perhaps most importantly, we have Preventive Maintenance Compliance – maybe the biggest indicator as to whether or not your preventive maintenance program is actually working. Note that the best way to track this ultimately depends on the ability of your employees to consistently and accurately record both started and completed times within the CMMS Software of choice. Preventive Maintenance Compliance ultimately allows you to make better and more informed decisions about what work should take priority in the moment, so again – keeping your schedule up to date is very important.
Not only do many CMMS dashboards track the Preventive Maintenance Compliance KPI automatically, but many even take it one step further by offering a “Schedule Compliance Score.” This is a number that tracks the overall rate at which work orders are successfully completed in real-time across a pre-determined period.
That score is calculated by taking the total number of completed jobs and dividing it by the total number of scheduled jobs for the period. So if you had 8 completed jobs and 10 scheduled jobs over a one week period, or Schedule Compliance Score for that week would be 0.8, or 80%.
Again, maintenance management is something that involves a wide range of different “moving parts,” so to speak. This has always been true and it always will be. But by monitoring essential key performance indicators like those outlined above in your CMMS programs, you’ll go a long way towards guaranteeing the level of visibility and insight you need when you need it the most. This is just another in a long line of examples of why software solutions like CMMS and CRM systems are of paramount importance.
