How Maintenance Managers Can Successfully Achieve Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are two problems maintenance managers can face;
- Not enough information to keep the business powering along at optimum performance. Without adequate reporting, you are basically flying blind.
- The second issue also has its own set of dilemmas – too much information.
There is an almost infinite number of maintenance reports you could get, however, unless the key performance indicators (KPIs) are relevant and meaningful, all they will do is bog you down, send you off on tangents and make your job even harder, and your working week longer than it already is.
Why are KPIs in maintenance management important to help streamline your operation?
Key performance indicators are used to measure the effectiveness of the maintenance management solution, that directly impacts asset/equipment performance and total maintenance costs.
Setting KPI targets and monitoring the performance will;
- increases asset life
- improves labour productivity
- reduces costly downtime
- minimises inventory investments, and
- lowers the total cost of maintenance.
As you can see from this depiction of a KPI dashboard, a simple green, yellow and red system lets you see at a glance which areas are critical and need your urgent attention, and which are currently under control.
It’s important to know this. For example, some Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can incur penalties, so you need a clear picture of what’s going on.
With the right KPIs at your disposal, maintenance managers are able to see through the haze – and the maze – and make confident decisions, rather than educated guesses.
Examples of maintenance management KPIs
As you would expect, the KPIs you need could be totally different to those required by maintenance managers or facilities managers in other industries.
They could span across such aspects as;
- the number of critical outstanding jobs
- how many scheduled jobs are overdue
- labour utilisation and availability
- costs/budget analysis
- response times, and more.
It’s simply a matter of working out what you and your team need. For example, your storeman may need KPIs about stock and lead times, while a manager will concentrate on the broad ‘big picture’ KPIs.
Setting KPI alerts
The first thing to do is to work out what your alert levels actually are. Some issues may be critical, while others may simply be something you have to keep your eye on for now. Once you decide what will trigger an alert, such as if a target is not being met, it’s a matter of working out what actions need to happen when an alert triggers.
These actions may take the form of Notifications or Job Escalations and from them, automatically-generated reports can be sent to specific people.
If you have a powerful computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) you can access all relevant data fast and have everything you need at your fingertips, including:
- summary data
- charts and graphs
- highly configurable reports,
- and much more.
KPI dashboards ensure real-time information is instantly available, allowing the data being collected to work for you. With quick access to key metrics, you’ll have all the data you need to make correct decisions at your fingertips.
Trend KPIs to reduce reactive maintenance
To avoid tasks unexpectedly becoming critical, MCGlobal Solutions recommends trending KPIs. By trending KPIs, you’ll know if your maintenance projects are improving or diverging from your target metric.
Client trend KPI example
One of our clients found this process particularly useful. They set up a trend to monitor the number of preventive maintenance jobs per month. Not wanting to swamp their team at the start, our client gradually started enabling them – and made an interesting discovery. As the preventative maintenance went up, the reactive maintenance went down. Not only that, but our client also achieved:
- quantifiable cost savings
- improved output, and
- higher safety standards.
By utilising KPI trending, you may even see the point of diminishing returns, where stepping up preventative maintenance no longer has such a big impact on reactive maintenance.
Enterprise Asset Management Reporting
A cutting-edge Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) program gives you the tools to automatically generate reports, customised lists and schedules through predefined parameters. It will also display a list of report groups with their corresponding reports. Without switching applications, you can access, copy, set up and view all reports.
MCGlobal Solutions’ powerful, fully-integrated EAM/CMMS does all this and more. It also includes features designed to give you an added level of depth to analytics, such as:
- pre-populated standard reports, sorted in folders by category
- a simple report setup tool that makes creating new reports or modifying existing ones fast and painless
- automated scheduling of reports and KPIs that can be emailed regularly to others (either from your address book or from the labour, requester or contact modules)
- SMART reports allow data to be modified and viewed from within the report itself, making batch edits or quick status updates a breeze.
The top 8 maintenance management reports
The following is a list of the most run – and recently run – reports.
- Risk Work Orders – Overdue
- Delayed Work Orders
- Audit Reports
- Work Order Assignments by Labour
- Work Orders Issued but not Completed
- Asset List by Location
- Asset List by Classification
- Labour Cost Report
For more information and advice about how to get the KPIs you really need, please contact our friendly and highly-experienced team at MCGlobal Solutions, simply click here to contact us. We can arrange a free live demonstration of our asset management software based on your specific issues.
