Almost any enterprise with physical assets deals with maintenance, but without leveraging data, it cannot reach peak efficiency. Enterprises consistently aim to establish top-tier maintenance teams, which necessitates more than simply recruiting the appropriate personnel. 

Traditional maintenance protocols mostly revolve around manual logs, spreadsheets, and paper trails, all of which translate to fragmented data and not tracking the numbers that actually matter. World-class maintenance teams leverage data-driven decision-making, and that means understanding the important maintenance metrics and utilizing them to drive efficiency. Let’s take a look at how you can do that.

Metrics vs. KPIs: The Difference

There are a plethora of metrics maintenance teams can track, and, more often than not, they confuse them with maintenance KPIs. Leveraging metrics starts with understanding the fundamental difference between these two, so you know what to track and how. 

Maintenance KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are benchmarks to measure how your maintenance teams are performing, for example, whether they’re achieving their goals. These include things like asset downtime, maintenance spending, asset efficiency, and production downtime. So, they are targets that track progress toward achieving objectives like reducing maintenance costs and unplanned downtime.

Meanwhile, maintenance metrics are specific data points that organizations track. Using these, their teams can evaluate success through KPI benchmarks, monitoring potential asset failures, task progress, maintenance requirements, and so on. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) are some of the most common metrics that track assets, employees, and operations that influence whether you fulfill your KPIs. 

In short, metrics are the data points your KPIs utilize to indicate how successful your maintenance team is at meeting its goals. Setting KPIs is critical, but teams must first understand and benchmark the right metrics to measure operational performance and work towards achieving their KPIs.

Key Metrics to Monitor

While there are an umpteen number of maintenance metrics companies monitor, there are some that are non-negotiable. Here are the most vital metrics your maintenance team must benchmark and track:

1. Maintenance Backlog

Backlogs show accumulated maintenance work to guide teams on which issues need to be addressed first for safety concerns or to prevent breakdowns. The longer maintenance work goes pending, the larger the risk of costly and complex failures, which is why monitoring this metric is a must.

2. Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)

MTTR measures the maintainability of reusable assets, representing the average time to repair a failed asset or how long it can go out of production. As such, it’s impactful to your bottom line, as tracking MTTR will help you make repair/replacement decisions, understand staffing needs, and optimize inventories. Here’s how to calculate MTTR:

MTTR = Total downtime duration/number of downtime periods

3. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

MTBF indicates the time lost when assets fail during operation, and for business-critical assets, it’s a key indicator of their performance. MTBF essentially tells you how reliable your assets are, predicting their future performance and, more importantly, helping your team implement preventive maintenance. Here’s how to calculate MTBF:

MTBF = Total of (start of downtime – start of uptime) / number of asset failures

4. Equipment Downtime

Equipment downtime tracks the number of hours (or days, months, etc.) that your asset is not operating. This can be because of planned downtime (such as scheduled maintenance) or unplanned downtime (asset failure or sudden breakdown), and tracking it helps to determine preventive maintenance efficiency, operational bottlenecks, which areas of the production line need more attention, and other key aspects. Here’s how to calculate this:

Equipment downtime = (Hours of downtime / total period measured) x 100

5. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

One of the most important metrics for maintenance, OEE tells you the effectiveness of an asset, depending on three main factors:

• Asset availability: Run time / planned production time
• Asset performance: (Ideal cycle time x total utilization count) / run time 
• Asset quality: Good utilization count / total utilization count

Here’s how to calculate OEE:

OEE = Asset availability x performance x quality

6. Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP)

PMP shows the number of maintenance hours actually dedicated to planned maintenance, and it’s extremely useful for organizations. By measuring PMP, teams can understand how their maintenance time is being used and then identify issues in conducting maintenance, equipment bottlenecks, planning errors, etc. You can see how maintenance hours are used, how much is for fixing issues, and how much is unplanned downtime. Here’s how to calculate this:

PMP = (Planned maintenance duration / total maintenance duration) x 100 

Final Thoughts

There are various maintenance metrics to measure, including average days for work order completion, work percentage covered in a work order, maintenance cost as a percentage of replacement asset value (RAV), and so on. However, benchmarking core metrics sets the right foundation for approaching maintenance KPIs and driving operational stability. This means closely monitoring metrics like MTTR, MTBF, OEE, and maintenance backlog. 

These metrics are the business-critical measuring sticks that steer your maintenance floor towards success. More importantly, they ensure continuous improvement in maintenance planning so that your team becomes more efficient, especially as your business expands.

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