KPIs with High ROIs: How to Achieve Facility Maintenance Goals

As a maintenance or facility manager, you know how badly you need key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your facility operating smoothly. You can’t improve your maintenance processes in the dark, and you absolutely need accurate, up-to-date information to ensure your equipment runs correctly.

That said, your time is precious. As a manager, you can’t afford to spend all your time studying KPIs and endlessly tracking information. You have to pick and choose which KPIs are essential, which are “nice-to-haves,” and which are more trouble than they’re worth.

Knowing which KPIs pay off the most dividends is as crucial for your excellence as it is for your sanity. To understand which KPIs deliver the most payoff, they should be directly attached to your goals.

Here are the three facility maintenance goals you can achieve with profitable KPIs:

1. Asset Life-Cycle and Performance

Obviously maintenance revolves around the assets in your facility, so the KPIs that give you the best indication of performance over time will be your best guides.

As we’ve covered, unplanned equipment downtime is a critical KPI so long as you also know why the downtime occurred. Unplanned equipment downtime, like mean time between failure, is actionable — you can quickly spot what equipment is taking the brunt of the maintenance costs and determine whether it is more cost efficient to replace or maintain an asset.

If you only look at unplanned downtime versus uptime without context for why the unplanned downtime happened, you won’t have a clear picture about the state of your facility. You’re not wasting time if you’re constantly looking for the “why” behind unplanned downtime. Rather, you’re not spending enough time on these KPIs if you’re not seeking the “why.”

2. Maintenance Efficiency and Effectiveness

Unlike asset performance, this is where facility managers tend to get lost in the KPI weeds. One of the trickiest KPIs to measure is tool time or “wrench time,” as it often delivers mixed levels of value. While there is no doubt that understanding the time spent on maintenance tasks is helpful, putting too much stock in time alone isn’t always a great indication of team performance.

Attempting to standardize and estimate time for work orders can be misleading, as unexpected roadblocks can easily throw off these estimations. In contrast, there are other metrics that are often far better at determining the effectiveness of a maintenance program or team:

1. Already alluded to in the asset section — the percentage of equipment uptime (or downtime relative to uptime).
2. The percentage of reactive maintenance compared to planned maintenance.
3. The number of reworks on equipment (getting them as low as possible).
4. A specific twist on compliance to a maintenance plan — the percentage of work orders completed on time.

In other words, instead of putting too much stock in time spent, look a bit closer at the actual output of the maintenance staff. You’ll have a better picture of where you are and what you can do to improve.

3. Cost Savings

Cost saving measures can come in many forms, but many of the important KPIs overlap with the goals in other sections.

For instance, the percentage of reactive maintenance versus planned maintenance can show you not only how robust and effective your maintenance plan is, but if you’re losing money scrambling for repairs when it would be more cost-effective to continuously maintain an asset over time.

Likewise, unplanned equipment downtime and the number of reworks can be an indication that it would be more cost-effective to plan for a major capital investment to replace an asset near the end of its life cycle.

These metrics can be combined with energy efficiency metrics that, when compared to facilities of similar size and age, can be used to determine if it would be more cost-effective to install more efficient equipment or invest in planned maintenance to prevent equipment from exerting more energy than necessary. While energy efficiency isn’t as important as uptime, spending at least some time reviewing these numbers can give you a clearer indication of the efficiency of your facility.

Read the Essentials

While a “well performing” KPI is nice to look at, they should always be seen as opportunities to take action. In general, tracking metrics that aren’t tied to an action is not an efficient use of time. By using KPIs as a starting point for change, your approach will help you run a more efficient and cost-effective facility.

If you’re still unsure about which maintenance KPIs are among the most important for a facility manager, we cover them in our recent e-guide which you can download below.