11 Best Maintenance KPIs to Track Your Team’s Success

Maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs) are essentially benchmarks that tell you if your maintenance program is working as intended. They allow you to spot issues and fix them before they turn into major problems in an effort to achieve organizational goals.

The only downside? There are so many maintenance KPIs to track that it’s difficult to determine which ones will be the most beneficial for your organization. In this guide, we look at the most commonly used maintenance KPIs and how to choose the best ones to track based on your goals.

What Is a Maintenance KPI?

A maintenance KPI is a value used to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and performance of your maintenance activities. Insights from maintenance KPIs help you optimize asset performance, reliability and operational efficiency and fine-tune complex maintenance strategies. Most maintenance teams use KPIs for a combination of these purposes:

• To monitor asset performance, reliability and repair efficiency: This is a prime reason to track maintenance KPIs — after all, the world’s largest manufacturers lose $1.5 trillion a year to production outages.
• To evaluate the effectiveness with which you’re using labor and material resources: An average maintenance technician takes an average base salary of $54,434. Tracking their work through KPIs is critical to ensuring your investment in salaries is ROI-positive.
• To measure the financial impact of maintenance activities: Monitoring KPIs is vital to realizing the full financial benefits of your maintenance program — a predictive maintenance program can help reduce downtime by 35 to 50 percent and extend asset lifespan by 20 to 40 percent, significantly lowering costs, improving safety and enhancing product quality, all of which have a remarkable financial impact.
• To monitor potential safety or compliance issues: Failure to comply with safety regulations can cost your company a ton of money. For example, serious and other-than-serious violations of guidelines issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can invite a penalty of up to $16,131 per violation.

The Importance of Maintenance KPIs

The famous Austrian-American educator Peter Ducker rightly said, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.”

That’s exactly why maintenance KPIs are important — they help measure progress toward your goals. Maintenance KPIs provide a vital goal measurement tool that gives you actionable insights into areas for improvement and helps make data-driven decisions. Here are examples of maintenance goals and the corresponding KPIs that help track them:

• Improved asset performance: Mean time between failure (MTBF), overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), asset utilization rate
• Higher team productivity: Work order completion rate, mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Lower costs: Maintenance cost per unit of output, planned maintenance percentage (PMP), cost per work order
• Improved safety and compliance: Number of safety incidents, compliance rate
• Minimizing downtime: Equipment uptime, unplanned downtime rate, reactive maintenance ratio
• Organizing work order management: Work order backlog, first-time fix rate

Maintenance KPIs vs. Maintenance Metrics

Maintenance KPIS and maintenance metrics are often used interchangeably, but they are different when you’re talking about maintenance goals. Maintenance KPIs are strategic indicators that directly align with your maintenance goals, while maintenance metrics are broader operational measures used to monitor specific processes and outcomes. Think of it this way: Every maintenance activity you track is a metric, but the metrics directly relevant to your main goal are KPIs.

Let’s get some more clarity with an example. Suppose your goal is to improve equipment uptime to meet production goals. You’ve decided to track MTBF, which measures how long an asset runs before something breaks. This makes sense because it ties directly into your main goal: keeping machines up and running. The longer the machines run, the faster you can achieve production targets.

Simultaneously, you might also choose to track MTTR, which tracks the average time it takes to repair equipment after a failure. But in this case, MTTR is more of a metric because it doesn’t directly reflect strategic outcomes like MTBF. You care about MTTR, but it’s not the main driver for your success.

Now, let’s flip around. If your goal is to minimize downtime during equipment failures to maintain production continuity, MTTR becomes your KPI, while MTBF is just a helpful metric — useful, but not a headliner.

11 Important Maintenance KPIs to Track & How

You can track various KPIs depending on your goals. Let’s look at some maintenance KPIs and what each one measures, so you can choose the ones that fit your needs best.

Asset Performance Metrics

• Equipment downtime: Measures the total time an asset is non-operational because of failures or maintenance activities.
  • Equipment Downtime = Total Downtime Hours
• Mean time to repair (MTTR): Tracks the average time technicians take to repair equipment after it fails. It’s a metric used to evaluate your maintenance team’s efficiency in restoring operations.
  • MTTR = Total Repair Time / Number of Repairs
• Mean time between failures (MTBF): Measures the average time between equipment failures. It’s an indicator of the asset’s reliability and performance and highlights your preventive maintenance strategy’s effectiveness.
  • MTBF = Total Operating Time / Number of Failures
• Mean time to failure (MTTF): Tracks the average time until a non-repairable failure occurs, mostly used for assets or systems that are to be replaced.
  • MTTF = Total Operating Time Until Failure / Number of Failures
• Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): Gives you a comprehensive view of how well you’re using equipment in production by measuring overall performance through a combination of availability (= Operating Time / Planned Production Time), performance (= Actual Output / Ideal Output) efficiency and quality rates (= Good Output / Total Output).
  • OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality 

Operational Metrics

• Maintenance backlog: Refers to the total number of incomplete maintenance tasks.
  • Maintenance Backlog = Total Number of Pending Work Orders
• Work order completion rate: Tracks how effectively work orders are completed within a given period. A high work order completion rate indicates strong team performance and effective resource allocation.
  • Work Order Completion Rate = [Number of Completed Work Orders / Total Work Orders Created] x 100
• Planned maintenance percentage (PMP): Measures the percentage of maintenance work that was planned as part of your proactive maintenance strategy.
  • PMP = [Planned Maintenance Hours / Total Maintenance Hours] x 100
• Preventive maintenance compliance: Assesses how well your team follows maintenance plans by measuring the percentage of scheduled preventive maintenance tasks completed on time.
  • Preventive Maintenance Compliance = [Number of Completed PM Tasks / Total PM Tasks Scheduled] x 100

Inventory Metrics

• Spare parts turnover ratio: Tracks the frequency of using and replacing spare parts over a specific period.
  • Spare Parts Turnover Rate = Cost of Used Spare Parts / Average Spare Parts Inventory
• Maintenance cost as a percent of Replacement Asset Value (RAV): Compares maintenance costs with the asset’s replacement value. It helps assess the cost-effectiveness of maintaining an asset and helps in deciding if it’s time to replace the asset.
  • Maintenance Cost as a Percent of RAV = [Total Maintenance Costs / Replacement Asset Value] x 100

How to Determine Which Maintenance KPI to Track

Every KPI should be tied directly to a specific, measurable objective. Your goal may be to improve asset performance, reduce maintenance costs or increase compliance. Pick a goal, and make sure it aligns with your larger operational goals.

For example, your goal could be to increase equipment uptime by 15 percent over the next six months to ensure production lines run at full capacity. Here are examples of KPIs you might consider using in this case:

• MTBF: Track asset reliability with MTBF and see whether your maintenance strategy is effectively preventing failures.
• OEE: OEE gives you a more comprehensive view of asset performance, factoring in availability, performance and quality. It tells you about uptime and whether an asset is operating at peak efficiency.
• MTTR: MTTR is a supporting metric in this context, not a KPI. It helps you monitor your team’s speed and effectiveness in responding to failures.

How a CMMS Can Help Track Maintenance KPIs

Once you’re ready to track maintenance KPIs, you’ll need standard operating procedures (SOPs) written for:

• Data collection: You need to standardize the process to collect data covering various aspects of maintenance operations, including downtime, repair history, maintenance backlog and audit reports.
• Assigning responsibilities: You need a standard procedure to determine the team or technician who will monitor, report and analyze KPIs regularly.
• Corrective actions: Create an SOP to help technicians decide on corrective action when KPIs indicate underperformance.

You can execute these SOPs the old-school way, in which you invest human and other resources in collecting data, creating reports, assigning tasks and monitoring KPIs, or you can take a more efficient approach. Modern companies use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to automate most parts of the tracking process. Here’s what a CMMS software offers:

• Centralized control: Using a CMMS gives you centralized access and control over maintenance data. You can access data and create and assign work orders from any supported device with an internet connection.
• Automated data collection: The software automatically collects maintenance data required to calculate KPIs — such as equipment downtime, repair histories and work order completion time — and stores it in a centralized, remotely accessible database.
• Automated reports: Modern CMMS solutions include built-in reporting tools that automatically track KPIs.
• Real-time alerts: You can configure the CMMS to alert you when a KPI breaches a predefined threshold. This ensures none of the problems that could have been communicated via KPI tracking are overlooked.

Coast packs all of these features into an intuitive, mobile-friendly platform. It allows you to create customized workflows to automate almost any maintenance process and has built-in communication tools for real-time collaboration.

Still wondering if Coast is right for you? Book a demo today to learn more.