With these 10 KPIs you manage reliability, maintenance and costs

Which KPIs fit your maintenance challenges?

For a production-critical installation the focus is on availability. For a maintenance organisation with a growing work backlog you mainly want to know where execution is getting stuck. So you do not have to measure all ten KPIs. Choose the indicators that match your main maintenance challenges and assess them together.

Reliability and availability: what happens if an asset fails?

For a production-critical installation you mainly want to know how often failures occur, how long repairs take and what that means for availability. For that you use MTBF, MTTR and asset availability.

A rising MTBF is favourable: the average time between failures increases. But if repair time rises sharply at the same time, overall availability does not necessarily improve. Conversely, a shorter MTTR can keep an installation more available without the failure frequency decreasing.

Do you need to improve the reliability of components, adjust preventive maintenance or speed up fault handling?

Maintenance execution: are we also getting the planned work done?

Is your maintenance organisation struggling to keep the planning on track? Then look at the percentage of planned maintenance, work order completion, the maintenance backlog and PM compliance.

Suppose the percentage of planned maintenance is high, but the maintenance backlog keeps growing. Investigate where that backlog is coming from. Is there insufficient capacity, is work being postponed or is unplanned maintenance always given priority? Is it mainly less urgent work that is postponed, or is maintenance on critical installations being left undone?

PM compliance shows whether preventive maintenance tasks have actually been carried out within the agreed timeframe. Even with a good score, it remains important to assess whether the maintenance programme is delivering the desired results.

Costs and resources: where can you save without extra risks?

If you want to control maintenance costs, set them against the replacement value of your assets. Are costs rising structurally? Then compare the cost of overhaul with the cost of replacement. Also include technical condition, remaining life and the consequences of downtime in your assessment.

Do technicians regularly have to come back because parts are missing? You see that in your first time fix rate. A high inventory turnover rate can point to efficient inventory management, but it can also go together with shortages of critical parts. Holding more spare parts in stock is a solution, but it costs money too. Do the savings on inventory costs outweigh extra technician visits and longer downtime?

Alongside these ten general maintenance KPIs there are also sector-specific indicators. The water boards, for example, have agreed national KPIs with which they can measure their performance in a uniform way and compare it with each other. That also provides starting points for learning from each other’s approach.

Reliable KPIs? Start with the data you record

Take a pump that fails. The technician creates a work order, fixes the fault and closes the work order. But has it also been recorded when the pump failed and when it was operational again? Without that data you cannot reliably determine the duration of the downtime. For MTBF you also need to know when failures occur and how long the pump was operational in between. Simply counting the number of fault work orders is not enough.

So for each KPI, determine which data are needed, where you record them and who is responsible for registration. Also agree on definitions. When does something count as a failure, for example? And which maintenance activities fall under planned maintenance? If teams make different choices on that, you cannot properly compare their performance.

Make trends in your asset performance visible

For that you need to record measurement results historically and compare them at fixed moments. By automating the measurements, you avoid having to collect and process data again for every report.

Is MTBF rising, for example, after you have adjusted preventive maintenance? Is the maintenance backlog falling after a change in planning? And are the results improving for all assets or only for certain installations?

Another important indicator: what is the condition of your asset?

The ten KPIs discussed can all be measured and tracked in IBM Maximo Application Suite (IBM MAS) with the right registration and set-up. But you also want to know the technical condition of an asset. Which installations show signs of deterioration and deserve extra attention?

An additional KPI is the condition score, which combines different data to assess the state of an asset. Which factors count and how heavily they weigh is something you determine per asset type.

With IBM Maximo Health you can combine maintenance history, condition measurements and other asset data into an asset health score. The system also shows which data are missing for the assessment, for example an installation date or replacement value. That way you know which information you still need to add to arrive at a reliable condition score

Which KPIs are relevant for your assets? And how do you manage them with IBM Maximo? Get in touch with Gerben ter Horst on +31 (0)6 14 57 21 19 or g.terhorst@gemba.nl.