For facility managers, key performance indicators (KPIs) for planned maintenance deliver important insights into operations, including where you stand and where you’re headed. By accurately measuring performance for backlogged work order, preventive maintenance compliance, and planned maintenance percentage against both maintenance and business goals, facility managers can rebalance resource allocations to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Working with hard data makes decision-making easier, and you can save time, money, and effort.
What’s the difference between a maintenance metric and a KPI?
People tend to use them interchangeably, but there are important differences.
A metric is a single data point that does not show a path to long-term goals, while a KPI is a measurement of data and gives a roadmap of how to reach your business goals.
Although metrics are sometimes included in KPIs to create plans, KPIs are more in-depth and give you a clear view of what you need to do to reach your goals. A maintenance professional can use KPIs to help them see where their programs aren’t performing well and then find solutions.
For example, a budget metric is just a simple data point. For example, it might be the amount you spent on parts for a specific asset. But a budgetary KPI can show you what percentage of your overall budget is going to parts, if it’s too much, or if you should be investing more.
What are examples of planned maintenance KPIs facility managers should track?
Your planned maintenance depends on many different factors, including industry, location, even the age of your facility and assets. The maintenance lead at a warehouse has different concerns than someone trying to keep a manufacturing line up and running. A warehouse in Alaska tracks its HVAC more closely than one in a milder climate. That said, there’s a lot of overlap
The three KPIs most facility managers would need to track when looking at the overall health of their preventive and condition-based maintenance programs:
- Backlogged work orders
- Preventive maintenance compliance (PMC)
- Planned maintenance percentage (PMP)
It’s important to understand what each could be telling you about your maintenance programs.
Backlogged work orders
The term “backlogged” might seem negative, but it all depends on how you look at it.
If you see backlogged work orders as all the work your team has overdue because they haven’t had time to close it out, you feel like you’re struggling to keep up. But, when you see it as approved work listed according to priority, it’s just that—work you have planned but not yet scheduled.
Tracking here helps you keep the list up to date and manageable. But keep in mind that regardless of the length, the “direction” is also important. A rapidly growing or shrinking list deserves further investigation. And if you have somehow managed to reduce the list to zero, it means you overspent on resources or there are many maintenance tasks out there you don’t know about.
Maintaining an accurate backlogged work order list can also help you with other KPIs. Once you know the work the team needs to complete, you can create better preventive maintenance schedules.
Preventive maintenance compliance (PMC)
Every preventive maintenance program leverages the simple fact that it’s always easier and less expensive to fix small issues before they develop into large problems. So, the better you can stay on schedule with your inspections and tasks, the less maintenance costs you in overall time, money, and stress.
PMC is a measure of the percentage of planned maintenance completed over a specific time. Take the total number of completed PMs and divide it by the number of scheduled PMs before multiplying it by 100.
The limitation with the KPI, though, is that it’s not showing you how many of those completed PMs were late. Although in many cases, “better late than never,” being behind schedule on PMs goes against the core principle, that you need to time work for before the asset or equipment fails. Outside that window, you’re running extra risk.
So, you might have eventually completed all your scheduled PMs over the last six months, but only after all of them were already behind schedule. The KPI is 100%, which looks great, but hiding behind it are serious issues with planning and execution.
To make the KPI a better indicator of what’s happening in the department, you can narrow the definition of “complete” to mean only those PMs the team closed out within 10% of the maintenance interval. For example, the team would need to close out a monthly PM within three days of the interval.
Planned maintenance percentage (PMP)
PMP tells you what percentage of your total maintenance was planned vs reactive. The higher the percentage, the better, because it means you’re not relying on quickly putting out fires to keep the facility running.
To calculate PMP, divide the total number of planned maintenance hours in a set period by the total number of maintenance hours. Multiple the result to get your percentage.
When calculating the PMP, be careful with your definition of “planned.” It should only include work that was organized and scheduled before an asset or piece of equipment failed. So, if a fan goes offline late on a Friday, and the team schedules repairs for the following Monday, that does not count as planned maintenance.
Benchmarking involves finding numbers specific to your industry, but generally, 90% is world class, it’s more realistic to aim for 80%, and many are stuck around 55%.
Above 90%, you’re likely making errors in your calculations. Remember, there are many good reasons to use reactive maintenance on some of your assets and equipment, so you’re never going to reach 100% planned.
Planned maintenance KPIs can deliver many benefits, but there’s only way to get reliable, actionable KPIs is with accurate, up-to-date data. For a modern maintenance department, that means they need a cloud-based facility and maintenance management platform that automates data capture and simplifies reports. By making the move to digital, data generated through work orders, both on-demand and PMs, remains safely inside the system, where you can seamlessly share across the team and then leverage into KPI-packed reports.
By Jonathan Davis
Jonathan writes about asset management, maintenance software, and SaaS solutions in his role as a digital content creator at Eptura. He covers trends across industries, including fleet, manufacturing, healthcare, and hospitality, with a focus on delivering thought leadership with actionable insights. Earlier in his career, he wrote textbooks, edited NPC dialogue for video games, and taught English as a foreign language. He holds a master's degree in journalism.
