Best Maintenance Metrics to Measure Asset Performance

Every piece of equipment owned by your company tells a story through its performance data. But which numbers matter the most? For maintenance, choosing the right metrics to track can mean the difference between preventing equipment failures and facing costly downtime. 

Using this essential maintenance performance metrics guide, you can make smarter decisions about your assets and maximize their lifespan. We’ll explore everything from common maintenance metrics like equipment downtime to more complex ones like overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). No matter the amount of time you currently spend tracking metrics, you’ll quickly learn what’s most important for your business’ bottom line.

What Is a Maintenance Metric?

A maintenance metric determines the success of various aspects of your maintenance operations — from individual assets and projects to team performance and departmental efficiency. These metrics are your company’s vital signs, providing concrete data about how well your equipment, team and maintenance processes perform.

These measurements help you answer critical questions about your operation: How reliable is your equipment? How efficiently does your team respond to issues? How well are you managing maintenance costs? Common maintenance metrics include mean time between failure (MTBF) for measuring equipment reliability, mean time to repair (MTTR) for evaluating maintenance efficiency and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) for assessing total productive capacity.

Managers use these key metrics to set precise targets, measure current results and compare performance across different time periods or facilities. Each metric has its own formula and standard method of calculation, ensuring consistent measurement regardless of who collects the data. And get this: Modern maintenance management software systems track these numbers automatically. 

The Importance of Maintenance Metrics

Think of maintenance metrics as your guide to understanding the profitability and cost-effectiveness of your most crucial assets, ensuring that all the decision-making you do around maintenance work is backed by real-time data. These measurements point the way to needed changes and improvements, while also giving you a baseline for what’s working. Here are six ways your maintenance department can benefit from tracking maintenance metrics:

Enhanced Asset Performance

By tracking how efficiently your equipment operates over time, you can spot patterns that signal potential issues before they become problems. It allows you to make informed decisions regarding equipment maintenance and replacement.

Increased Team Productivity

A few ways you can measure how effectively your maintenance staff handles their workload is by looking at completion rates, response times and labor utilization. These findings help optimize staffing levels and identify training opportunities.

Cost Savings

Monitor repair expenses, parts inventory and overall maintenance budgets to ensure you get the most value from your spending. Research shows that implementing condition-based maintenance can reduce labor, downtime, parts and other related costs by 30 percent. These savings help justify investments and identify new cost-reduction opportunities.

Improved Safety & Compliance

Keep tabs on incident rates, inspection results and regulatory requirements. Through regular monitoring, you can prevent accidents and ensure your business meets all necessary standards.

Decreased Equipment Downtime

Calculate crucial equipment measurements like MTBF and MTTF to understand equipment reliability and maintenance efficiency. It minimizes production losses and unexpected breakdowns.

Organized Work Order Management

Evaluate your maintenance scheduling and execution through metrics like open work orders, completion times and maintenance backlog volumes. Good scheduling keeps important work from falling behind.

Combined, these metrics create a data-driven foundation for maintenance decisions. Managers can spot trends, allocate resources, and adjust programs based on actual performance rather than assumptions.

Maintenance Metrics vs. Maintenance KPIs

While maintenance metrics and maintenance KPIs both measure performance, they serve different purposes in your maintenance strategy. Let’s clear up the distinction:

Maintenance Metrics 

These are your day-to-day measurements that connect specific actions to their outcomes. Think of these as your tactical measurements — like tracking how long a repair takes or how often a machine breaks down. These metrics give you immediate feedback about specific maintenance activities.

Currently, 66 percent of teams rely on computerized maintenance management system software (CMMS software) to track their maintenance program, making metric collection more accurate and accessible.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

These are your strategic measurements that tie maintenance performance to larger business goals. If your company aims to cut operational costs by 15 percent this year, you might track several maintenance metrics — repair costs, labor hours and parts inventory — to support this broader KPI.

Here’s a Practical Example 

Let’s say your goal is to reduce equipment downtime. You might track several metrics:

• Mean time between failure
• Average repair duration
• Maintenance schedule compliance

These individual metrics feed into your KPI of reducing total downtime by 25 percent annually. The metrics tell you how specific aspects perform, while the KPI shows whether you achieve your strategic goal.

The key is choosing metrics that directly support your KPIs. Rather than collecting data for its own sake, focus on measurements that undoubtedly show progress toward your company’s maintenance goals. Modern maintenance teams understand that successful tracking requires both detailed metrics for daily operations and broader KPIs for long-term strategic planning.

Best Maintenance Metrics to Track for Asset Performance

Tracking the right metrics helps maintenance departments optimize their operations. These five fundamental measurements provide key insights into asset performance and reliability. Let’s examine each metric in detail:

Equipment Downtime

How to measure it:

[Hours of downtime / Total operating hours] × 100

Importance:

The International Society of Automation (ISA) estimates that manufacturing facilities lose between 5 to 20 percent of their productive capacity during each downtime incident, making this one of the most crucial metrics to track. Excessive equipment downtime directly impacts production capabilities and your bottom line.

Pros:

• Asset reliability patterns become visible through consistent tracking over time.
• Direct measurements show how well maintenance programs are performing.
• Maintenance teams can pinpoint specific areas needing improvement.
• Downtime data provides concrete evidence when requesting maintenance investments.
• Facilities can measure their performance against industry standard downtime rates.
• Preventive maintenance schedules can be adjusted based on downtime patterns.
• Staff performance can be tracked through equipment uptime measurements.

Cons:

• Planned and unplanned downtime often get mixed together in measurements.
• Accounting for scheduled shutdowns complicates downtime calculations.
• Partial operational capacity is difficult to reflect in downtime metrics.
• Manual tracking introduces errors into downtime records.
• Supply chain delays affect downtime measurements independently of maintenance.
• Teams may focus solely on reducing downtime numbers rather than quality.
• Setting up tracking systems requires substantial monetary investment.

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)

How to measure it:

Total repair time / Number of repairs

Importance:

MTTR calculates the average time it takes an individual or team to diagnose the root cause of an asset issue, repair it, complete its maintenance and get it back to normal operation. It encompasses the entire maintenance cycle, from initial diagnosis through repair completion and return to service. Using this metric, maintenance teams are able to evaluate both the efficiency of their work and the capability of repairing assets.

Pros:

• Bottlenecks in repair processes can be identified and addressed.
• Direct measurements reveal technician performance and efficiency levels.
• Maintenance schedules can be optimized based on repair time data.
• Resource allocation improves with accurate repair time tracking.
• Clear performance benchmarks emerge from repair time measurements.
• Training needs surface when analyzing repair response patterns.
• Problems can be prevented by understanding repair time trends.

Cons:

• Parts availability issues can distort repair time measurements.
• Repairs of varying complexity create inconsistent time averages.
• Diagnostic and testing periods may not be accurately captured.
• Speed metrics might overshadow repair quality considerations.
• Data collection varies between different maintenance personnel.
• Non-repairable items cannot be measured using MTTR.
• External factors affect repair times but aren’t reflected in measurements.

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)

How to measure it:

Total operating time / Number of failures

Importance:

It indicates equipment reliability and maintenance program effectiveness, helping teams optimize preventive maintenance schedules and predict potential failures.

Pros:

• Preventive maintenance tasks can be scheduled based on failure patterns.
• Equipment reliability trends emerge through consistent tracking.
• Unexpected breakdowns decrease with proper monitoring.
• Maintenance planning improves with failure interval data.
• Similar equipment performance can be compared objectively.
• Equipment replacement timing becomes clearer with age.
• Parts inventory decisions improve with failure pattern knowledge.

Cons:

• Only repairable equipment can be measured with this metric.
• Failure documentation must remain consistent over time.
• Operating conditions affect failure rates in ways metrics can’t capture.
• Accurate predictions require substantial historical data.
• Maintenance might be delayed to artificially extend intervals.
• Single measurements miss important performance factors.

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)

How to measure it:

Total operating time / Total number of assets in use

Importance:

Critical for predicting life expectancy of non-repairable components, this metric helps maintenance teams plan replacements before failures occur as well as optimize inventory management.

Pros:

• Replacement planning becomes strategic rather than reactive.
• Spare parts inventory stays optimized for predicted needs.
• Equipment failures can be prevented through early prediction.
• Budget planning improves with failure forecasting.
• Product quality differences show up in failure rates.
• Purchase decisions improve with lifespan data.

Cons:

• Measurements only apply to non-repairable items.
• Significant historical data is needed for accurate tracking.
• Current operating conditions may not match past performance.
• Multiple asset calculations become statistically complex.
• Small sample groups produce unreliable results.
• Test conditions often differ from actual usage patterns.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

How to measure it:

Availability × Performance × Quality

Availability measures operating time against planned production time; Performance measures actual speed against ideal rates; and Quality measures good units against total output.

Importance:

OEE provides the most detailed view of asset performance by combining multiple factors into a single metric. It helps identify inefficiencies across all aspects of equipment operation.

Pros:

• Equipment productivity can be viewed across multiple factors.
• Both output quantity and quality are measured together.
• Specific areas needing improvement become apparent.
• Performance can be benchmarked against industry standards.
• Maintenance decisions gain solid statistical support.
• Production capacity usage becomes clearly measurable.

Cons:

• Calculations require detailed data collection across many variables.
• Multiple data points must be tracked simultaneously.
• Results interpretation requires careful analysis.
• Measurement methods need consistent application.
• Monitoring systems require significant investment.
• Overall scores may mask individual problem areas.

All five of these maintenance metrics help maintenance teams analyze performance and make data-driven decisions. As such, regular monitoring helps prevent failures, optimize schedules and justify preventive maintenance investments.

How to Determine Which Maintenance Metric to Track

To select the right maintenance metrics for your company to track, start by answering these fundamental questions:

What’s the Goal? 

Begin by identifying your primary maintenance objectives. Are you aiming to reduce costs, increase equipment uptime, extend asset lifecycles or improve team efficiency? Your goals will determine which metrics matter most. 

Likewise, if reliability is your focus, tracking MTBF becomes essential.

Why Is the Goal Important? 

Understanding the goal’s significance helps prioritize your tracking efforts. Consider the direct impact on your operations and business outcomes. 

When reducing equipment downtime is your goal, this directly affects production capacity and revenue. Similarly, if cost reduction is the priority, tracking maintenance spending metrics becomes crucial for demonstrating ROI.

How Can We Track the Progress of This Goal? 

Once you’ve established your goals, determine specific measurements and data collection methods. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can automatically gather data on work orders, asset performance and maintenance activities. 

Regular review of these metrics reveals trends and progress toward your objectives.

What SOPs Could You Implement?

Having clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) ensures that you’re tracking maintenance metrics consistently. That’s why it’s crucial for you to develop clear protocols that outline:

• Specific data points to collect
• Timing and frequency of measurements
• Staff responsibilities for data recording
• Tools and systems to use
• Schedule for reviewing results

Review your chosen metrics quarterly to ensure they continue serving your organizational goals, and adjust tracking methods as needed to maintain data accuracy and relevance.

How a CMMS Can Help Track Maintenance Metrics

A CMMS like Coast transforms maintenance metric tracking from a manual task into an automated, streamlined process. Here’s how it helps maintain better control of your maintenance operations:

• Centralized organization: The platform provides dedicated workspaces for managing locations, assets, work orders and preventive maintenance schedules in one place. With this organization, you can more easily monitor and analyze performance across your entire facility.
• Complete asset management: Store all critical asset information — from model and serial numbers to complete maintenance histories — in an easily accessible format. Using this extensive data, you can identify patterns that may indicate potential problems with your equipment.
• Real-time work order tracking: Work order management features allow immediate updates on repair times and task completion, with the ability to attach photos and detailed notes. MTTR and maintenance backlogs can be calculated accurately using the data in this documentation.
• Automated preventive maintenance: The system automatically generates recurring work orders based on your specified timeframes, ensuring consistent tracking of planned maintenance activities.

Ready to improve your maintenance tracking? Sign up for a Coast demo to optimize your maintenance strategy today.