How Can a CMMS Help with Maintenance KPIs?

Before we dig into maintenance KPIs, let’s explain a bit first.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, broadly speaking, standards for measuring the progress of an endeavor. Whether in personal or professional contexts, we all benefit from having clearly defined goals and being able to track our general performance.

At work, in particular, they help gain deeper insight into projects, teams, or even organizations. For example, are we moving forward as planned, or are we hitting roadblocks? Are we meeting our targets or lagging behind? How do we even know what our targets should be?

The answers to these questions are always a function of our business goals and the metrics we choose to track.

What Are Maintenance Metrics?

Metrics are any data that represents an organization’s performance. Anything from staff attendance to equipment downtime and uptime could be valuable for a company, depending on its goals. Maintenance KPIs have clearly defined expectations drawn from these metrics.

KPIs should be the most important measures used by companies, business units, or project teams to track their progress against strategic goals. A well-designed set of KPIs ought to provide the vital navigation instruments that give everyone an understanding of current levels of performance.
Bernard marr & Co.

How Is This Related to Maintenance Management?

Well, in multiple ways. Firstly, maintenance KPIs link the goals of the maintenance team with specific organizational goals. It’s one thing to talk about the importance of a robust maintenance strategy. It’s another to use numbers to show why.

If you define your KPIs properly, you will be able to show how the processes and goals of the maintenance department align with and help further the business’s bottom line.

Tracking and measuring maintenance KPIs is the difference between saying “This maintenance process helped the business” and “This maintenance strategy cut maintenance time by 10% and saved the business $5000 in maintenance costs on a particular asset in 3 months, and prevented the loss of $300,000 worth of production hours in the whole factory over a year.”

What Maintenance KPIs Should You Be Tracking?

When it comes to metrics, you will want to be industry- and organization-specific regarding what you track and your optimal maintenance goals. For example, you will likely be thinking about the kind of assets you have and your production costs. What are your current and long-term goals as a company? Are you looking to increase production or increase revenue? Given your team’s bottom line, what would optimal asset performance look like?

These are questions to consider when nailing down your KPIs. That said, most teams can benefit from tracking the following essential maintenance KPIs.

Equipment Downtime

Equipment downtime refers to any amount of time during which equipment isn’t working. This is sometimes planned due to preventive maintenance work as part of the overall maintenance schedule.

Other times, however, unplanned downtime might occur, and production might stall as a result of faulty or malfunctioning assets. While this is more likely in organizations that rely more on reactive maintenance than preventive maintenance, the costs can quickly add up in any case, with industry estimates setting losses due to downtime at around $50 billion yearly.

The Equipment Downtime formula is:

(Hours of Downtime ÷ Total Time Measured) x 100.

Of course, opinions tend to vary regarding what a world-class standard would be. Still, most industry experts agree on aiming for assets to run at no lower than 90% capacity), meaning less than 10% downtime.

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)

Like Equipment Downtime, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) measures how frequently assets are out of commission. As the name suggests, this tracks unplanned events or failures.

The way to measure this is by noting the production time over a long period, say a year, and dividing that by the total number of equipment failures to occur within that time frame.

The MTBF formula is:

MTBF = Total Uptime of Repairable Asset ÷ Number of Failures of Asset within given time period

For example, an asset with 2000 production hours within a year and 10 failures during that time would have an MTBF of 200 hours. There are no set figures regarding world-class MTBF standards, but aiming for a high MTBF is always a good idea. A good CMMS helps you easily visualize the trends in your MTBF. Falling MTBF figures often indicate that maintenance operations need to be reevaluated.

CMMS that track completed work orders and asset metrics deliver the data needed for root cause analysis during equipment failures.

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is the average time spent on corrective maintenance of assets. It includes not only repair time in addition to time spent on anything from facility managers delegating tasks to contractors diagnosing failures to the team figuring out a maintenance plan. This is then divided by the number of times the assets in question have failed. The formula is: total downtime/number of failures.

The MTTR formula is:

MTTR = Total Maintenance Time on Repairs ÷ # of Repairs

For example, if an organization spends 50 hours total on unplanned maintenance for an asset that broke down eight times in one year, the asset’s MTTR is 6.25 hours. The calculation would be:

50 hours ÷ 8 = 6.25

MTTR can be calculated as a function of specific assets and for organizations as a whole. As with most maintenance KPIs, there’s no one-size-fits-all figure to aim for. Things to consider include the assets in question and their importance in the production process. That said, experts suggest keeping MTTR below 5.

Maintenance Backlog

Maintenance backlog comprises any pending maintenance tasks, whether corrective or preventive. The KPI quantifies the amount of time required for maintenance activities to be carried out by a specific number of maintenance workers.

Usually measured in work days or weeks, this is another metric best kept on the low side. That said, a number on the high side isn’t always cause for concern. Instead, what’s important is to be aware of what backlogs exist and why, as well as to keep all stakeholders engaged in ensuring an efficient maintenance process.

You also can track Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP), Schedule Compliance, and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). All of these maintenance metrics have detailed rationales behind them as well as formulas for quantifying them. However, the best thing about all these metrics and numerical formulas is that you don’t have to struggle to remember them. That’s where a good CMMS comes in.

How Can CMMS Help with Maintenance KPIs?

Helps Centralize Your Maintenance Information

The KPIs listed above are only a few of the ones available. There are many ways for teams to measure the success of their maintenance programs. In addition, the various numerical formulas for calculating each KPI can be a challenge to remember on the fly.

A good CMMS offers streamlined data and asset management, eliminating the need to commit these formulas to memory or to remember exactly which maintenance KPIs you are tracking and why. It’s all there in the palm of your hands.

Facilitates Real-Time Data Reporting

In addition, robust CMMS software stores your data in the cloud. MaintainX, for example, has an intuitive reporting functionality that allows for comprehensive real-time recording of maintenance performance metrics and KPI data by team members.

As a result, you can see what is happening as it happens, gaining real insight into just how well your maintenance processes are working.

Check out MaintainX. Our advanced Reporting features are second to none.

Helps You Delegate Work

Having access to information is one thing. Knowing who should do what is another. The best CMMS helps you quickly and easily assign maintenance responsibilities and can even eliminate the need to do this manually.

MaintainX, for example, has an intuitive user experience that allows for creating, approving, and dispatching work orders with only a few clicks. In addition, the app has detailed functionality with dashboards that can organize work orders with filters such as stage of completion, status, priority, and time and cost reports.