Keeping assets and equipment running at peak performance is critical to any organization. It’s important for companies to have standard processes in place to track all of their assets and equipment that are prone to failures in order to maximize uptime and keep disruptions at a minimum. To ensure that you are meeting your goals, you must set a quality benchmark to measure the current effectiveness of the processes and understand where you have to make improvements.
What Are Maintenance KPIs?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are performance metrics that help you measure the performance of a person, or department, the overall performance of your entire organization, and how effective you are at achieving your goals.
Why You Need To Track Maintenance KPIs
Maintenance KPIs help to keep maintenance expenses low while helping to avoid unplanned downtime.
KPIs vs. Maintenance Performance Metrics
KPIs are the measurements of how well your operation is doing at achieving its defined maintenance goals, such as reducing downtime or minimizing costs.
Maintenance metrics give you insight into how everything and everyone is operating at your facility. Maintenance performance metrics track the individuals, equipment, operations, and inventory that influence whether you reach your goals.
Important Metrics that You Need To Focus On
1. Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) is a vital Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that represents the average time required to troubleshoot and repair failed equipment and return it to normal operating conditions. MTTR gives organizations an accurate analysis of how well their teams are responding to repairs and equipment problems.
Calculating MTTR
- Total time spent on unplanned maintenance for an asset.
- Divide that number by the number of failures that occurred with that equipment over a defined period of time.
2. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a KPI that measures an asset’s reliability along with the amount of time that elapses between one failure and the next. MTBF metrics provide in-depth and detailed information on the status of assets. This KPI helps organizations optimize preventive maintenance schedules to help minimize unexpected failures and unnecessary costly maintenance. This metric is a good measurement of the expected asset lifespan. MTBF is commonly used for repairable items.
Calculating MTBF
- Identify the total number of operational hours for a specific asset over a defined timeframe.
- Divide that number by the number of failures that happened during that timeframe.
- A low MTBF can be contributed to either an operator error or past repairs that were not satisfactorily made.
3. Mean Time To Failures (MTTF)
Mean Time To Failures (MTTF) is a KPI that measures the reliability of non-repairable equipment. It measures the length of time that an asset is expected to last in operation until it fails. Unlike MTBF which is used for repairable items, MTTF is used when fixing an asset isn’t an option.
Calculating MTTF
- Take the total number of operational hours and divide that by the number of assets you’re monitoring.
4. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
The OEE measures the overall effectiveness of the company, which allows you to determine whether the processes you’ve put in place are efficient or need to be improved. This is one of the most valuable measurements and gives you a better insight on:
- How often assets are available to work.
- The performance and speed of your manufacturing process.
- How many products (or services) are manufactured (or executed) without any kind of defects or failure.
Calculating OEE 
- Availability is calculated as the ratio of Run Time to Planned Production Time.
- Performance is calculated by comparing current production against projections.
- Quality comes from the total production minus the items that are defective.
5. Planned Maintenance
This KPI will help you determine the time spent on planned activities (maintenance, repairs, or replacements) on an asset and shows the level of effectiveness of the company and its performance.
6. Preventive Maintenance
This KPI measures the percentage of preventive maintenance tasks (PMs) that have been completed on schedule in a specified timeframe.
7. Reactive Maintenance
This is a measurement for maintenance work that interrupts the daily or weekly maintenance schedule and is calculated as a percentage of the total maintenance labor hours. Reactive maintenance – often referred to as breakdown maintenance – means that equipment repairs are performed after the equipment breaks down. Unscheduled downtime disrupts business operations, can cause late deliveries, lost customers, high production costs, and revenue losses. In the reactive approach, failures occur unexpectedly, and technicians waste valuable time trying to resolve the issues quickly.
8. Root Cause
This metric helps you to get a deeper understanding of why problems occur and what their root cause was. Having this deep understanding will help maintenance teams resolve issues faster. If the analysis indicates that it is a human error, this is a good sign that your staff needs additional training so that the issues don’t continue. Bottom line is that you must identify any issues and their root causes so that you can effectively take the necessary actions to get them resolved and processes put in place to minimize these issues from happening.
9. Maintenance Backlog
This maintenance metric gives you a better understanding of an accumulation of maintenance work that needs to be done based on safety issues or to prevent breakdowns. This KPI is extremely important because the longer that work orders are not completed, the greater the risk of more serious and costly breakdowns.
Maintenance KPI Goals and eWorkOrders
eWorkOrders CMMS gives organizations the ability to set and measure KPIs from productivity to the overall organization’s maintenance performance. CMMS is one of the best ways to track maintenance KPIs giving users the ability to develop baselines that measure and identify opportunities for improvement.
Our CMMS gives you the tools that you need to evaluate all of your KPIs, like tracking work orders, labor costs, preventive maintenance metrics, advanced reporting, and much more. eWorkOrders organizes your data and gives you access to real-time information from anywhere. When you work with the eWorkOrders team, you get a dedicated industry expert who was actually a user of our CMMS software and brings real hands-on experience to ensure your success. Contact us today to learn more about how CMMS can help give you better insights into how your maintenance operations are working.
