Maintaining your organization’s physical assets is essential for running your enterprise efficiently. The goals are minimal downtime, minimal energy use, and ensuring that your physical capital lasts as long as possible – so as to remain an asset rather than becoming a liability. The way highly successful organizations achieve these goals is through preventive maintenance.

In order to excel at maintaining your company’s assets, you need the insight derived from key performance indicators, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You need to know what equipment needs work, what needs to be prioritized, where resources should be focused, and what routine preventative measures must be taken in order to keep your equipment in optimal working order.

Collect, track, and analyze using the performance indicators that are the most relevant to your business. Measuring is the way that we as humans can truly understand something. Through understanding comes control – and the ability to improve.

Here are 6 of the most critical KPIs that your organization can use to get a clear picture of how to keep your enterprise running as smoothly as possible today and years into the future.

1. How Reliable Is Your Equipment? – A Look at Mean Time Between Failure

This is an extremely important measure for asset heavy enterprises. The mean time between failure, or MTBF, refers to the time in between unexpected breakdowns of an asset or production stoppages. The goal of your maintenance efforts is to have the MTBF continue to increase. For a fairly accurate measurement, the mean times are usually assessed annually.

2. Where Are the Root Causes of Failure Within the Life Cycle?

If the MTBF is indicating poor performance, then the next step is to identify which part of the equipment’s life cycle is causing the issue – the original quality, the severity of day-to-day operations, the quality of replacement pieces, or the actual maintenance workmanship and routine.

Collecting information on why failures are occurring is an important key performance indicator that can help your business adopt better life cycle practices. Could your operators benefit from increased equipment training? Is the machinery breaking down because it is simply too old? Is your maintenance team ensuring that high quality parts are being used to keep company assets in excellent working condition?

3. How Many Work Orders Are Performed on Time?

While building a performance trend line with lagging indicators like the MTBF is crucial, so too is checking to see if your organization is practicing healthy maintenance habits with leading indicators. Evaluating the percentage of condition inspection work orders that are performed on time is a useful indicator of how likely breakdowns are to occur. This is also a simple and inexpensive KPI to utilize with a robust CMMS product.

4. How Effective Is Your Maintenance?

To get a clearer picture of the quality of your maintenance work, take a look at the ratio of planned maintenance to how much reactive maintenance is being performed. This Key Performance Indicator (KPI) will give your organization a good idea of where maintenance expenses are going.

Preventative maintenance is almost always less costly than reactive maintenance work. It is also helpful to keep track of how many training and refresher courses are being taken each year per maintainer to get an idea of how much energy is being put into keeping those in charge of maintenance up-to-date and knowledgeable.

5. The Number of End-User Complaints

Your product is as good as your customers perceive it to be. This is why tracking the number of end-user complaints is an essential KPI for maintenance. In order to understand the true quality of your products, collecting and analyzing user feedback is essential. Effective CMMS software will be easily customizable, allowing your organization to track the important end user feedback that will help you to be proactive about making positive changes when necessary.

6. Cost of Maintenance per Asset

How much are you spending on maintenance per asset? How do the actual maintenance costs compare to the budgeted costs? Keep track of these numbers to find out where all the resources are being used to maintain your equipment – and to determine if this is money well spent or not.

With the right key performance indicators, your organization can flawlessly manage your assets. It is through the insight that comes from measuring performance that will foster understanding – and therefore effective, positive steps and preventative measures. Contact Eagle Technology to learn how our powerful CMMS product, Proteus, can help your business stay ahead, and in control.