The easiest way to track maintenance numbers is using a CMMS. Some maintenance departments use a different vendor for assets, work orders, inventory and PM’s, but we like to make it easy and provide all of those with our product. All of the CMMS information is integrated and easy to retrieve and look at. But having the access via your CMMS is one thing. Using all the modules to track everything maintenance is another. And the biggest and final step is using all the modules and the resulting data to inform your maintenance KPI’s.
– Defining your KPI’s
If you have already done this step, you are way ahead of the game. If you haven’t, well, the simple way to create KPI’s is to determine what makes your department successful and fits with organizational goals. For instance, if the organizational goals for the year include a percentage involving compliance or a capital planning milestone, you should build your KPI’s to measure achievements related to those objectives.
If your organization doesn’t have departmental goals for you, start with employee productivity, budget and safety. These are three winners that lend themselves to every organizational goal. We are happy to help you if you need a good set of starter KPI’s.
– Create your reports
We don’t know about you, but we think some types of reporting just illustrate numbers better than others. Is it useful to have a series of numbers on a spreadsheet to show the ups and downs of productivity? Yes, definitely. But isn’t it better to take those numbers and create a graph or chart that tells you with one look how you’re doing? We think so, which is why we added Intelligence Manager to our CMMS. It’s easy to create visually appealing charts and graphs to illustrate how you are doing with your KPI’s.
If you are not using a product like Intelligence Manager or there is an extra cost associated with using the reporting function in the CMMS you are using, you can use the charting and graphing capabilities in Excel to illustrate your success or opportunities to improve. What’s most important here is you know what you are measuring so you can create the report. For instance, if your KPI is to reduce the mean time to repair by 2%, then your report would pull information related to when the ticket was opened and closed or completed.
If you are dealing with separate systems that aren’t integrated or for whatever reason don’t share information, you might have to develop some high level Excel skills to help with the numbers. If you don’t want to hone your Excel skills to expert level, we suggest taking a look at some of the available CMMS options and comparing.
– Measure your success (or failure)
Understanding the data and finding ways to improve the numbers is always the tricky part and also the most important. If you’ve streamlined your process and your mean time to repair is just off your goal you might have to evaluate how realistic your goal is. Take a look at the work orders that failed – is it because field techs had to wait on parts to be ordered? If so, are you using your inventory module and ordering is the point of failure? Examine the data to resolve the problems your field techs are facing, and your KPI’s will improve.
This is just one example of how using all the modules available to you in your CMMS helps you with your KPI’s. If one module isn’t speaking to another, there can be all kinds of hold-ups. While it all seems like a ‘this is just how it works’ moment, the reason KPI’s are created is to streamline and update the workflow to reduce budgetary spend and increase productivity.
Why It Matters
As you take a look at the results of your KPI’s and the data associated with them, you’ll start to notice patterns that lend themselves to change. Some of the change is an easy fix, like when you notice your inventory reduces by half but your work orders don’t reflect the use of many of the parts you are missing. Or when you notice it took one of your field techs four hours to change a lightbulb. Those are easy changes to track down and make.
It’s the more difficult ones, like if you scheduled your PM on a specific day, assigned it to a specific tech and that tech called in sick and the PM work order didn’t get completed. Those are the difficult questions that having a visual dashboard showing you what is going on in real time will help. And if not a visual dashboard, then certainly tracking the KPI’s by creating your own report format from month to month will.