Here\’s a good PDF from UpKeep highlighting in a simple form the various key performance indicators and metrics any facilities manager should establish and track.
Source: Upkeep.
PDF here
Except from the article:
When it comes to maintenance planning, 2 you will likely focus on both lagging and leading indicators—the former to show your progress, and the latter to manage root causes. But as explained, choosing the right ones to track can be a challenge. How do you know what’s worth tracking? These considerations may help in the decision-making process.
What Are Your Organization’s Goals?
For starters, consider your goals. These can be any goals from your organization. For example, if your goal is to increase production, you’ll need some metrics around maintenance to ensure that you’re hitting your availability targets. Of course, at lower levels, your goals would get more specific. In a manufacturing plant, for instance, you might have a goal to increase your conveyor system’s uptime by a certain percentage. With that goal in mind, you’ll be able to start looking at which leading indicators would support that. Make a list of possibilities to get started. Your list might include your preventive maintenance (as a percentage of total maintenance), your schedule compliance for the preventive maintenance, and your maintenance backlog.
What Are You Already Tracking?
When you have an idea of which indicators might help you meet your overall goals, determine what you’re already tracking and start there. For some metrics, you’ll need some time to get enough data to make it truly meaningful. As such, using those wouldn’t be as economical as pulling from existing data. In our conveyor system example, if you’re already tracking preventive maintenance but not other metrics, start with that one. If you’re not tracking schedule compliance or work order backlogs, you can’t use those until you do, and getting that data together would take extra time.
At the end of the day, it’s a return on investment calculation. What’s the benefit and cost of tracking the metric? If thatratio is large enough (or at a minimum, the benefit outweighs the cost), then you should consider tracking it. But be careful with over-tracking metrics. Many companies track metrics but never use them for anything. Ask yourself these questions:
- What are you planning to use this for?
- What actions are you going to drive?
- What does this help you understand about your business?
What Type of Assets Are You Tracking?
The matter of which type of assets you’re tracking is another important consideration. Different assets have different needs and purposes, and what would make sense for one might not be right for another.For example, if you’re tracking a mission-critical mixer, you’ll likely want to 5 focus on preventive maintenance, mean time to repair, and other such metrics. For something less important like lightbulbs in the men’s bathroom, you’re probably not too interested in the time it takes to replace those. Instead, measurements such as stockouts or other inventory metrics would be
more relevant.
How Critical Is the Asset?
Criticality, of course, should always enter into your decisions on what metrics to track. A non-critical piece of equipment wouldn’t be as important to track as one that’s core to your process.
If an asset is at high risk of failure, and if that failure would have a significant impact on your process, you’ll want to track it more carefully by monitoring leading indicators. For an asset that’s less likely to fail and that wouldn’t cause a significant disruption if it went down, surface-level monitoring with lagging indicators might be more appropriate. Risk is also important. If it’s low-critical equipment, but it fails multiple times daily, the risk is very high. Small, chronic failures are a big issue in manufacturing.
Cause and Effect Relationships
The last consideration is a matter of cause and effect. When choosing leading indicators, you’ll need to determine whether they truly have an impact on your desired results. After all, metrics are only of any value if they are predictive in nature. Often, finding whether a given metric is truly predictive of future success is a matter of trial and error. You start tracking the data, and then see if lagging indicators correlate with it. Existing studies can also help you pin down cause and effect relationships. Back to our conveyor system example, studies show that preventive maintenance provides 12% to 18% cost savings over reactive maintenance, meaning there’s a good chance that tracking and improving preventive maintenance as a metric would help reduce unplanned downtime.
