Top 5 Maintenance KPI Examples to Measure Performance

Maintenance is expensive. From spare parts to maintenance tech salaries, running a maintenance program costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Most businesses spend that money because the benefits outweigh the costs. For example, a predictive maintenance program can help reduce downtime and extend asset lifespan by up to 50 percent.

But here’s the problem: How can you tell if your maintenance program is generating enough benefits to be ROI-positive? That’s where maintenance KPIs come into play. In this guide, we discuss the top five maintenance KPI examples that can best answer this question. Let’s jump in.

What Is a Maintenance KPI?

A maintenance KPI is a measurable metric used to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and success of maintenance activities. It tracks the performance of assets, projects, personnel and departments to ensure reliability, minimal downtime and lower costs.

Whether you’re looking to optimize asset performance or fine-tune your maintenance program, maintenance metrics can give you the insights you need.

Top 5 Maintenance KPI Examples

There are various maintenance KPIs for every use case, but let’s talk about the five most commonly used KPIs.

Equipment Downtime

Equipment downtime refers to the number of hours a piece of equipment remains inoperable, either because of an unexpected breakdown or planned maintenance. It’s expressed as a percentage of the total planned operating time for a given period.

Suppose Machine A operates 15 hours a day for 22 days a month (or 330 hours per month). According to your records, Machine A remained idle for 15 hours because of unplanned downtime and five hours because of planned maintenance.

Here’s how you’d calculate equipment downtime in this case:

Equipment Downtime = Equipment Downtime During the Period / Total Operational Hours During the Period

4.55% = 15 hours / 330 hours

Tracking downtime is critical because it can cost your company a ton of money, but it happens implicitly — you don’t see the money you lost on any financial statements.

Think of a car manufacturing plant for example. The plant relies on automated robotic arms for assembly. Each arm runs 20 hours a day for 30 days a month, but one robotic arm experienced 10 hours of downtime last month due to mechanical failures.

That’s a 1.67 percent downtime. Each hour of downtime translates to a loss of 50 vehicles due to stalled production. With 10 hours of downtime, the car manufacturer lost 500 vehicles last month, each of which sold for $30,000.

The revenue loss? A staggering $15 million.

Mean Time Between Failure

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is used to calculate the average time between failure events. A high MTBF indicates high asset reliability. It shows an asset can operate for longer periods without experiencing failure. Low MTBF signals low reliability and a need for more frequent maintenance.

Let’s say Machine A been operational for a total of 540,000 hours since you installed it five years ago, and it has failed three times during that period. Here’s how to calculate the MTBF for Machine A:

MTBF = Number of Operational Hours / Number of Failures

180,000 hours = 540,000 hours / 3 failure events

MTBF can provide various strategic insights. Let’s think about a gas turbine used in a power plant as an example. The utility company tracks the MTBF of gas turbines to measure reliability and schedule maintenance. The historical data shows the gas turbine experiences failure every 1,200 operating hours on average.

Tracking this number allows you to schedule inspections, lubrication and part replacements before reaching the 1,200-hour mark. If MTBF starts decreasing, you might consider design modifications or more frequent lubrication.

Maintenance Backlog

Maintenance backlog is a measure of scheduled maintenance work that’s still pending. The term “backlog” has a negative ring to it, but a backlog is sometimes smart. There are times when you need to prioritize certain maintenance tasks over others, which means several tasks could stay in the backlog for months. If the benefits of doing this outweigh the costs, it’s okay.

However, tasks that stay in the backlog for longer periods (over a year, for example) should be removed from the backlog altogether.

With that in mind, here’s how you can calculate the maintenance backlog (in days):

Backlog Work Days = Total Backlog Work Hours / Total Team Daily Productive Hours

Suppose your backlog currently has 100 tasks, estimated to take 200 hours to complete. You have a maintenance team of five that work eight hours a day, which means the team is available for 40 work hours a day (excluding breaks). Your backlog in that case would be five days:

5 days = 200 hours / 40 hours

If the maintenance backlog starts piling up and makes you feel uncomfortable, you might want to look into the maintenance team’s productivity or hire more technicians if necessary.

Work Order Completion Time

Work order completion time measures how long it takes on average to complete a maintenance task from the moment a work order is created in your work order software to when it’s marked as finished. It’s an indicator of your maintenance team’s efficiency.

Here’s the formula to calculate the average work order completion time:

Average Work Order Completion Time = Completion Time for All Work Orders / Total Number of Work Orders

Let’s say a window manufacturer takes 1,000 hours to complete 100 work orders. The average work order completion time for the window manufacturer is 10 hours:

10 hours = 1,000 hours / 100 work orders

While the average is a great “big picture” metric, monitoring completion times for each work order is also helpful, especially in identifying outliers.

If you believe a specific type of work order is taking too long, here’s what you can do:

• Ask the technician: They can tell you why a work order is taking too long — is the task too complex, are spare parts needed for the task always missing or is there a lot of guesswork involved?
• Address the problem: Add detailed guides to work orders in your maintenance management software to simplify the task for the technician or to reevaluate your inventory management strategy if spare parts availability is the problem.
• Optimize: Other than problems technicians report explicitly, look for ways to improve work order completion time. For example, you might consider assigning tasks based on technician expertise and availability to speed up resolution times.

Maintenance Cost as Percent of RAV

At one point, replacing the asset becomes a smarter choice than maintaining it. But how do you determine if it’s time? Maintenance Cost as a Percent of RAV (Replacement Asset Value) helps compare your maintenance costs and the cost of replacing the asset.

Suppose Machine A has a total RAV of $100,000. You spend $10,000 a year to maintain Machine A, so your maintenance cost as a percent of RAV would be 10 percent:

Maintenance Cost as a Percent of RAV = Annual Maintenance Cost / RAV

10% = $10,000 / $100,000

The acceptable maintenance cost range depends on your industry and the asset in question. However, 10 percent is typically considered high, which means it’s time to consider replacing Machine A.

Tracking this KPI ensures you avoid maintenance cost overruns and you’re using assets that are in top-notch shape.

Overall Benefits of Maintenance KPIs

Here are several benefits that tracking maintenance KPIs can have on a maintenance program:

• Improves team productivity: A long maintenance backlog is bad for your team’s morale and asset’s lifespan. Tracking your maintenance backlog helps track your team’s productivity. If the team is struggling to complete work orders on time, you’ll know it before it turns into a bigger problem and take steps to improve productivity.
• Reduces cost and spending: Tracking maintenance expenses with a KPI like maintenance cost as a percent of RAV keeps overruns in check. If you’re about to spend more than usual during a given period, you’ll see the metric reflect this early on, allowing you enough time to take preventive steps.
• Enhances asset performance: Metrics like mean time between failure (MTBF) help you track asset efficiency. If you see noticeable dips in MTBF at any point, it’s your cue to reevaluate your preventive maintenance program.
• Increases safety and compliance: Maintenance logs are an important part of ensuring safety. Unmaintained assets leave workers on the factory floor vulnerable to known safety risks and your business to non-compliance risks and both can cost plenty of money. Speaking of things that cost plenty of money…
• Decreases downtime: Downtime can translate to thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Tracking downtime is the first step to minimizing it. If you see an upward trend in equipment downtime, increasing maintenance frequency or tweaking the maintenance work order might help.
• Organizes work order management: Effectively managing work orders is central to running a successful maintenance program. Tracking a metric like work order completion time, for example, gives you insights into whether technicians are struggling to complete work orders in time. If not, offer more extensive guidelines for each work order in your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and see if that reduces work order completion time.

How a CMMS Can Help Track Maintenance KPIs

Maintenance KPIs allow you to monitor various parts of your maintenance program, but each metric may change multiple times a day as technicians perform maintenance. You need real-time visibility over maintenance metrics and that’s where a CMMS like Coast helps.

Coast collects data when technicians update work orders via a mobile app or through IoT sensors. The data is used to report maintenance KPIs that are updated in real time, so you can take corrective action and meet your maintenance goals without delays.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with Coast today.