Like any other business department, maintenance teams should strive to make data-driven decisions. And with modern CMMS, EAM, and IoT solutions, generating data has never been easier.
However, data alone isn’t enough. It needs to be put in the proper context. This is where maintenance metrics and KPIs come into play.
Whether it’s reducing unexpected breakdowns or improving technician productivity, setting and tracking relevant maintenance KPIs over time helps businesses contextualize their performance and stay operationally sound.
Today, we are going to cover the differences between KPIs and metrics and discuss how to select which ones you should track to improve the efficiency and productivity of your maintenance team.
What are key performance indicators for maintenance?
Maintenance KPIs are specific, measurable values that help organizations track and evaluate their maintenance performance over time. They provide insights into how well maintenance processes align with business goals.
Choosing the right KPIs depends on factors such as organizational goals, industry standards, the ability to gather necessary data, and the specific challenges faced by the maintenance team.
To decide which KPIs to track, maintenance departments should determine how maintenance supports overall business goals and focus on metrics that provide actionable insights and drive improvements.
For example:
- A manufacturing company focused on reducing production downtime might prioritize Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) as key performance indicators.
- If the goal is to improve asset reliability, they may also track Preventive Maintenance Compliance and general Schedule Compliance to ensure all preventive maintenance tasks are being completed on schedule.
- If the company is trying to reduce reactive maintenance, two of the metrics they would need to track are hours spent on preventive maintenance vs hours spent on reactive work.
In practice, organizations from the same industry will often end up tracking the same things. We will get into the specifics in a moment.
Maintenance KPIs vs maintenance metrics
While maintenance KPIs and maintenance metrics are often used interchangeably, they have a somewhat different purpose.
Maintenance KPIs are high-level indicators that measure the success of maintenance strategies in achieving business objectives. They help teams stay focused on long-term goals.
Maintenance metrics track specific operational activities and provide granular insights into daily performance. Metrics do not inherently indicate success or failure without a defined target.
A single KPI can sometimes depend on multiple supporting metrics. In a sense, you can look at a KPI as a key metric that is tied to a specific business goal.
Quick example:
- KPI: Equipment downtime. As a part of a strategic plan, it can be set as: Reduce equipment downtime by 20% within a year.
- Metrics supporting this KPI: The number of unplanned downtime incidents per month, the average duration of unplanned downtime, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
Understanding the difference between the two helps teams focus on what truly drives business performance rather than getting lost in excessive data collection.
That being said, many professionals used these two terms interchangeably. We might be guilty of that on our blog as well. In most cases, these are just semantics, but it doesn’t hurt to know the difference.
How to select which maintenance data to track
Tracking too many metrics can lead to information overload, while tracking too few may result in missed opportunities for improvement. Below is useful info that should help you strike the right balance.
SMRP standards for maintenance KPIs
The Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) has established a standardized framework for maintenance metrics, known as the SMRP Best Practices Compendium. These standards help maintenance and reliability professionals calculate KPIs and ensure consistency and benchmarking across industries.
SMRP categorizes maintenance metrics into five key pillars:
- Business and management: Metrics related to cost control, planning, and budgeting (e.g., Maintenance Cost as a Percentage of Replacement Asset Value).
- Manufacturing process reliability: Metrics that measure asset reliability and production efficiency (e.g., Overall Equipment Effectiveness, Mean Time Between Failures).
- Equipment reliability: Metrics focused on maintenance effectiveness and asset health (e.g., Mean Time to Repair, Asset Utilization).
- Organization and leadership: Metrics that measure workforce efficiency and compliance (e.g., Maintenance Training Hours per Employee).
- Work management: Metrics related to work order management and scheduling efficiency (e.g., Planned vs. Reactive Maintenance Ratio, Schedule Compliance).
Using these standards ensures that the metrics you choose align with industry best practices. We followed SMRP KPIs when building Sockeye — our maintenance scheduling solution — to ensure consistency and simplify internal benchmarking.
Actionable tips for selecting maintenance metrics
- Align metrics with business and maintenance goals: Identify how maintenance contributes to overall business objectives (e.g., reducing costs, increasing uptime, improving asset longevity). Then select metrics that directly impact these goals.
- Ensure metrics are measurable and actionable: Choose metrics that can be quantified. If a metric does not provide actionable insights or lead to process improvements, reconsider tracking it.
- Balance leading and lagging indicators: Leading indicators (predictive metrics) help anticipate problems before they occur (e.g., Schedule Compliance Hours). Lagging indicators (historical metrics) reflect past performance and outcomes (e.g., Total Unplanned Downtime Hours). A good mix of both ensures a proactive and data-driven approach to maintenance.
- Focus on critical assets and processes: Not all assets require the same level of tracking. Prioritize high-value, mission-critical equipment.
- Use industry benchmarks for comparison: Compare your maintenance metrics against industry standards (such as SMRP benchmarks) to gauge performance.
- Avoid metric overload: More data is not always better. Tracking too many metrics can dilute focus and lead to inefficiencies. Stick to a key set of metrics that provide meaningful insights without overwhelming your team.
- Occasionally review and adjust metrics: Maintenance needs and business goals evolve over time. Periodically reassess whether your chosen metrics remain relevant and adjust as needed.
Maintenance schedule KPIs and metrics to track
There are many different scheduling metrics you can track — but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In practice, what teams often end up tracking is what their software makes easy to track.
Being aware of that, our maintenance scheduler automatically tracks key metrics related to maintenance scheduling. These include:
- Schedule Compliance Hours: Measure adherence to the maintenance schedule as a percent of total time available to schedule.
- Available Hours Used: The percentage of available maintenance hours scheduled during a week.
- Preventive Maintenance Hours: Scheduled hours worked on preventive work orders
- Corrective Maintenance Hours: Scheduled hours worked on corrective work orders.
- Standing Work Orders: Scheduled hours on standing work orders. Can also be used for backlog management.
- Emergency Work Hours: Percentage of maintenance employee labor hours used on emergency work.
- And more.
You can find the full list of KPIs and metrics Sockeye supports out of the box here.
Stay on top of your maintenance scheduling performance with Sockeye
Sockeye is a CMMS bolt-on that maintenance teams use to simplify the scheduling of WOs and PMs. They integrate their CMMS with Sockeye and continue to schedule work using our intuitive interface and automated scheduling capabilities.
As such, Sockeye focuses on tracking SMRP KPIs and metrics related to maintenance scheduling. On top of that, you can set up custom KPIs to monitor additional metrics for your specific use cases.
The chosen metrics are shown within the KPI split pane. They are calculated and reported inside Sockeye based on the built schedule. Reports can be exported directly to Excel or forwarded to Microsoft Power BI.
For more info, we have a short video that explains how Sockeye helps you track, visualize, and report different metrics:
If you are not satisfied with your existing scheduling solution, give Sockeye a try. But be warned, 98 percent of companies who try Sockeye continue using it long term 🙂
Get started by booking a quick product demo.
