Maintaining business premises
Maintenance KPIs
Maintenance KPIs (key performance indicators) are the few figures that show whether a business's maintenance is working: how long it takes to respond and to repair, how often each piece of equipment fails, how much of the time it is available, whether preventive work is done on time and how many faults come back.
Also known asmaintenance metrics · maintenance indicators · maintenance dashboard · maintenance KPI
The six that matter for a business with premises
| Indicator | What it measures | How to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Response time | How long it takes for someone to pick up the report | Pick-up time minus report time, averaged |
| MTTR | How long a repair lasts on average | Repair hours in the period divided by the number of repairs |
| MTBF | How long a machine lasts between failures | Operating hours divided by the number of failures, per machine |
| Availability | How much of the time the equipment is running | MTBF divided by the sum of MTBF and MTTR |
| Preventive compliance | How many planned inspections were done on time | Inspections done on time divided by inspections planned |
| Reopened faults | How many faults come back after being closed | Reopened tickets divided by closed tickets |
In a factory these numbers come from a CMMS and from counters on each machine. In a restaurant, an office or a gym, almost all of them can be drawn from something more modest: a log of reports with three times (when it was reported, when it was picked up, when it was resolved), the inspection calendar and a column saying whether the ticket was reopened. MTBF and availability also require knowing which piece of equipment failed, so they only make sense for the machines that count most: the cold room, the extractor hood, the treadmills, the lift.
An example from a two-floor office: in one quarter, 40 reports come in (a made-up figure). If the average response time is 20 minutes but 6 reports are reopened, the problem is not speed but that jobs are being closed before they are fixed. If the target is written down, as in an SLA, every number has something to be compared against.
Worth knowing
The usual mistake is to measure what is easy rather than what is happening. Counting closed tickets rewards closing quickly; without reopenings next to it, a team can have very good numbers and premises that are still broken. A few indicators, always measured the same way and looked at every month, are worth more than a dashboard with twenty.
Sources
Related terms
- SLAAn SLA (service level agreement) is a written commitment to the time and quality with which a service is delivered. In a student residence it usually sets how many hours a maintenance ticket has to be picked up or resolved by type, and it is what decides what counts as overdue.
- Work orderA work order is the written instruction that assigns a maintenance job to a specific person or company: what needs doing, on which piece of equipment or where, with what priority and by when. When it is closed, the hours, the materials used and what was done are recorded.
- MTTRMTTR (mean time to repair) is how long it takes, on average, to get a failed piece of equipment working again. It is worked out by adding up the time spent on all the repairs in a period and dividing that total by the number of repairs in the same period.
- MTBFMTBF (mean time between failures) is how long a repairable piece of equipment runs, on average, between one breakdown and the next. It is worked out by dividing the operating hours in a period by the number of failures recorded in that same period.