Key Maintenance Management Statistics For Maintenance Planners

How to report maintenance metrics to management?

This article is a follow up to a previous article “Role Of The Maintenance Planner In Maintenance Management Programs“. Maintenance planners and maintenance managers need to provide regular status reports to management. What sort of data should you collect and how should you present it? If you do some research you will find a variety of ratios and numbers that seem to be very important. For example MTBF, MTTF, MTTR, downtime, backlog and so on. It can all get very confusing. Plus even if you are a genius and understand all this, you have the problem of explaining it to management! What are the simplest metrics you can collect?  What should you show management so they understand how good a job you are doing?

Important maintenance management statistics

1. Work order backlog: One critical number will be the size of your maintenance backlog. It is commonly measured in hours or weeks. The maintenance backlog is maintenance work that has not been completed. It is usually preventative maintenance work that has been delayed. This is frequently due to time & budget constraints and sometimes due to lack of spare parts. Over time you should be seeing a steady or falling work order backlog.
2. Average days to complete work orders: The average of the difference between work order Completed date & original Planned date for each work order. Look for unusually high values for the average days to complete work orders. This means that the maintenance plan should be checked. It could be because many tasks are taking more time than estimated. It could be that you have scheduling conflicts that need to be resolved. Examples of such conflicts are too many tasks scheduled at the same time, maintenance technicians not available and so on.
3. Work order completion percent: The percent of work orders in a period that have been completed. You want to see a high percent of completed work orders. A low percent of completed work orders results in a growing maintenance backlog.
4. Equipment downtime (not availability!): You want to measure total equipment downtime. Equipment availability especially when expressed as a percent can mislead you. For example the equipment downtime doubles from say hundred hours to two hundred hours. However, you may just see a small percent drop in equipment availability if you have many equipment. Also be aware that work order time (duration) is not the same as equipment downtime. The equipment can be down for a much longer time than the work order takes to fix it.
5. Preventive vs. Breakdown Time Spent: This is the ratio of how much time you spent on preventive maintenance vs. breakdown maintenance. Ideally it should be as high as possible. A low ratio generally means that corrective or breakdown maintenance dominates you maintenance schedule. This is the most expensive maintenance. It also causes a lot of discontent among users and customers. They are dealing with equipment breakdowns and you are scrambling to fix them.
6. Equipment with most preventive maintenance time/ cost: This is useful to identify which equipment requires the most planned maintenance. You should not see unexpected changes here over time other than seasonal changes.  This is because planned maintenance is something that is scheduled well in advance.
7. Equipment with most breakdown maintenance time or cost: Identify equipment that takes most time or money to fix due to breakdowns. This can help you setup correction plans and preventive maintenance that can reduce this.
8. Task estimating accuracy: This is the ratio of actual time to do the work order vs. the estimated time spent doing the work order. Ideally it should be 1 or 100% (if expressed as a percent). Low values (less than 90%) mean that work orders are taking less time to complete than estimated. You are overestimating work order time. Or it may mean that some task steps are being skipped by maintenance personnel. High values (more than 110%) mean that work orders are taking more time to complete than estimated. Not enough time may have been budgeted for the task. Or the skill level of maintenance personnel is low and they are taking more time than expected to complete jobs.

Reviewing your maintenance management statistics

You can see these statistics in action in the Statistics report we offer in FastMaint CMMS. Since it is a one-page report it makes it easy to share with management and to review where changes need to be made.

Use a CMMS software trial to get statistics

We offer a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS that you can download. You can use it to help you calculate and review these numbers for your site.