Performance Indicators in Maintenance

You’ve put all that hard work into getting your Maintenance Department running efficiently and you’re starting to notice a shift in your operation. Breakdowns are on a decline and PMs are starting to work like clockwork.

But we need facts to give us a true indication of where we are at and help us determine which areas are really paying dividends. We need Performance Indicators. As you read this, do you know what your Key Performance Indicators are? When management asks for a report asap, do you know what areas you need to look at to give you solid numbers to illustrate the your are actually improving?

What are the Best Performance Indicators?

To get down to the best performance indicators for maintenance in an organization we start in general and then look at maintenance.
A company is judged on how much profit they make for the financial year. That is, how much money you make for the company. If profit is up? Maintenance may have had an effect on this or it may not have. Comparisons are made to the total expenses for the year, and again maintenance may or may not have an effect on the savings. These are general performance indicators and don’t really give maintenance much to work with.

Now we are getting down to the indicators attributed to maintenance.

What levels are your Preventative Maintenance Schedules at? Another great measure is you’re PMs versus your Breakdowns. If you have high breakdowns and can never get in the units for PM Service, then that will give you a low Performance indicator. Rework is another great measure. What are your current levels of rework?

Uptime increase will only come about with the increase in PM. Having a low uptime will also result in high overtime, slow resolution of issues and all. Adding to this the condition of your equipment will tell you how well your maintenance is performing.

How Satisfied Is Your Team?

If you tell your team that profits are up, they will immediately ask for a pay rise. In saying that, you need to realize that people only care about money so far. Many of you have heard of the Maslow chart where there is a hierarchy of needs. In the grand scheme of things, what your employees are really after is job satisfaction. Ultimately, they want to be part of what’s going on. They want to be satisfied and happy with what they are doing. The question is, how do you provide a working environment to help provide this satisfaction?

You have tradesman that are craftsman in your ranks. To this day, what have they built? What quality stuff have they been involved in?
There are a range of things you can do. Start by changing the way you go about rebuilding units, create teams that are dedicated to one task or have dedicated shifts. By doing so, upon task completion there is a growing sense of pride, you will find that your employees are more focused and are proud of their hard work. At the end of the day this can serve as a reward for hard working employees and create higher quantity and quality work.

What you don’t do is reward people when your PMs are down, high breakdown, reworks up and maintenance costs are high. That is just illogical. You only reward when things get better.

At the end of the day, when you measure Quantity, you always have to try and measure quality! It’s that simple. A good place to be is when PM is 100% everything is done on time – that’s your Quantity and your Rework is done at 80% - That’s Quality. That’s the ultimate aim. Any lower and you should try to get the levels up.

These are some of the performance indicators and examples on how you can improve your results.

Stephen Ninnes
MEX General Manager
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