What are Maintenance KPIs Telling You? Why Context Matters

One of the supreme benefits of key performance indicators (KPIs) for facility maintenance is their ability to show where, when, and sometimes how equipment issues arise. Unfortunately, the answer to why a piece of equipment breaks down is not always cut and dry, even if some of the primary KPIs are telling you that something is wrong.

There is a solution: Instead of relying on isolated KPIs, qualitative information can give you the context you need to adequately understand a situation. If you don’t fill the gaps with proper context, you’ll be lost on practical solutions.

For example, unplanned equipment downtime as a percentage of uptime can tell you that a piece of equipment is not running as often as it should be, but the KPI alone can’t give you the exact reasons. The equipment might be faulty for myriad reasons, or maybe the unplanned time could be an indication that a maintenance team needs more training or expertise in a certain area.

When analyzing KPIs, it’s not only important to understand when they are signaling red flags, but to determine via context clues if the red flags truly exist. Here’s why you need more context to know what’s really happening, and how it helps improve facility maintenance performance. 

Why Mean Time Between Failure Adds Context, But Needs Context Itself

Mean time between failure is one of the most useful KPIs to determine when something is going awry. This is an “umbrella KPI” under which there are several sub-KPIs that will give you a more refined picture of what is going on with specific pieces of equipment. As a general note, if your mean time isn’t increasing by 10 percent or more, or if it’s going down, you likely have some issues on your hands.

The advantages of this KPI include the fact you know you’re measuring the time between failure, not just unplanned time. You can then deduce that a lower mean time is an indication of mechanical issues, but now you need more information. You don’t know if the issue was related to a poor capital investment choice, a lack of maintenance, conditions causing the equipment to overwork itself, or subpar maintenance work.

In order to understand how to proceed, you then need to understand what parts of the life-cycle are influencing the equipment. You can do this a few ways:

• Qualitative feedback for failure (i.e. contamination, misalignment, incorrect fastening, overheating, poor performance of specific equipment in other applications) Video and Photos highly recommended
• Quantitative (i.e. vibration test, unplanned downtime)
• KPIs showing maintenance time, effort and compliance

Why Maintenance Schedule Compliance KPIs Give Other KPIs More Contextual Weight

KPIs that directly show the overall efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance operations, such as compliance with maintenance schedules and the percentage of emergency repairs, can give KPIs like mean time between failure and unplanned downtime more much-needed context.

Remember, the size of the maintenance staff doesn’t matter so much, just how effectively the equipment runs as a result of stellar maintenance.

The percentage of emergency repairs going above 20 percent is an indication that “maintenance” as it should be properly understood isn’t being done effectively enough. Given that the entire point of maintaining something is so that it won’t need to be repaired, an overabundance of emergency repairs adds context to what other KPIs might already be telling you.

Schedule compliance is more ambiguous given that you can’t tell how effective the schedule itself is from this KPI alone. You can, however, make sure that when you are testing different maintenance policies and procedures, and you know the information you’re receiving is accurate because compliance is held above the 90 percent mark. So, regardless of the actual effectiveness of your current maintenance plan, you know it’s being executed. The other KPIs, then, are more likely to reflect true performance.

Check KPI Results with Additional Testing and Measuring

Of course, the benefit of measuring something is that you can test new methods to see if something will improve maintenance performance. This could be something as specific and simple as increasing the frequency that air filters are switched or coils are cleaned in an HVAC system, or something as broad as raising the frequency of monthly maintenance for essential facility equipment across the board.

As soon as you notice something is wrong, say you see that the mean time between failure is decreasing for your facility across the board or for a specific piece of equipment, you must first cross-reference with other KPIs to make sure you correctly identify what’s happening. Then, you can test how results change based on a new action plan.

A new action plan could include implementing training for employees, ensuring increased maintenance compliance (to keep the backlog in check), or even a complete equipment replacement.

By testing new methods, you can improve how you identify problems with and make changes based on informed hypotheses through contextualized KPIs.

Wondering which maintenance KPIs are the most essential to track? Download the guide below to get an at-a-glance look at effectively tracking maintenance performance.