Maintenance KPI Dashboards | What Are They & How to Create?

Competition is a great motivator. Whether you’re watching children play a board game, your favorite NFL team in the Super Bowl, or your maintenance team at your facility, everyone wants to know the score. 

When clear goals are established, and the maintenance team knows what actions are needed, sharing the ongoing progress through a KPI dashboard is an excellent way to make sure everyone “knows the score.” Such a tool is an easy way to motivate a team as well as pull everyone together toward the goal of improving performance. 

What Is a KPI Dashboard?

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate success of an organization, employee, or team in meeting objectives for performance. A KPI dashboard is a graphical representation using the leading and lagging KPIs to share information on how a process is performing.

For example, a KPI dashboard may help evaluate preventive maintenance performance including planned vs. scheduled tasks, number of labor hours, preventive maintenance costs, and overall equipment effectiveness. It serves as an ongoing scorecard. If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it.

Good Data Is Required

Before setting up a KPI dashboard, it’s important to have good, clean data. Data must consistently come from the same source, be accurate, be simple and understandable, and tell a story. Metrics dashboards are critical to empowering people to do the right thing consistently.

Besides having good data, it’s critical to share it. Everyone wants to see the scoreboard and understand how they are doing individually, as a team, or as an organization.

What’s Included in a Maintenance KPI Dashboard?

A maintenance KPI dashboard shows how the processes in maintenance are functioning in an organization. For example, a KPI dashboard for maintenance and reliability engineers has leading indicators that come from work identification, work planning, work scheduling, work execution, follow-up, and performance analysis. All of these impact the lagging indicator, which is the total number of functional failures as well as the subtotal by failure consequence, hidden safety, environmental, and operational issues.

We can also look at maintenance-related downtime, both unscheduled and scheduled, as well as shutdown overruns, maintenance costs, and others.

Our benchmarks include maintenance cost per unit output, maintenance cost as a percentage of replacement asset value, total maintenance cost as a percentage of total maintenance cost, and total maintenance cost as a percentage of total sales. Some of these figures can be directly managed, while others can be influenced. 

Leading vs. Lagging Maintenance KPIs

Leading KPIs lead to the results, and lagging KPIs are the results themselves. For example, a leading KPI could be preventive maintenance effectiveness that looks at emergency versus preventive maintenance labor hours; preventive or predictive maintenance compliance; percent of planned work; and rework percentage. A lagging KPI may be the mean time between failures (MTBF).

According to Ron Thomas, a leader in maintenance and reliability, “A proactive reliability process is the supply chain. If a step in the process is skipped or performed at a substandard level, the process creates defects known as failures. The output of healthy reliability processes is optimal asset reliability at optimal cost."

KPI dashboards provide alignment, allowing everyone to focus on the right things in order to achieve a desired outcome. Just like in any sporting event, both players and fans are focused on the scoreboard. It’s important to know the score.

Performance Measurement Explanation

In business, performance measurement is a fundamental principle of management. The measurement of performance is important because it identifies the gaps between current and desired performance and provides an indication of progress as efforts are put into place. 

KPIs should precisely identify where actions need to be taken to improve performance. For example, a company using emergency labor hours as a KPI may need to look at the effectiveness of its preventive maintenance program.

Maintenance Dashboard Requirements

In order to set up an effective maintenance dashboard, you’ll need to measure maintenance processes to optimize asset reliability at optimal cost. Begin by identifying the steps in the maintenance process from preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance through your failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system. This may include work identification, planning, scheduling, work execution, work order closeout, and failure reporting.

Once those requirements are met, select KPIs that are related to where your company is currently functioning as well as your goal. For example, if you're mostly reactive and you're trying to move to preventive, you should be measuring KPIs like percentage of planned work and preventive maintenance compliance. However, if you're already doing preventive maintenance and trying to move to predictive (PdM), you should be measuring things like defects found in PdM inspections and number of PdM work orders executed.

A planner may go back into the system and pull a random number of work orders to see if they are closed accurately. Be sure to identify the metric used in each step and post to the maintenance dashboard for specific audiences.

A dashboard can help a team understand if they are using the company’s resources effectively, including specific players in an organization. As a result, a maintenance dashboard should be posted where everyone can see it. Maintenance score dashboards should tell a story, good or bad. When people know the score, reflected with consistent, accurate data, they are able to make better daily decisions.

For instance, it’s critical that work orders are closed out correctly. Thus, a supervisor should review the work order, and a planner should close the order to ensure it’s not done haphazardly in the middle of other pressing priorities for the day. This can help ensure that the data going into the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is accurate, clean, and usable for the future.

Establishing Goals and Targets

It’s important to establish some goals and use the KPI dashboard to communicate progress. Here are possible examples:

• Storeroom Service: Set your storeroom service level goal at a certain level or for a certain improvement goal.

• Vendor Performance: Measure how frequently your vendors achieve on-time delivery.

• Material Parts Turn: Find out how long items sit in a storeroom without being used or on a store shelf without being purchased.   

Steps to Creating the Right Metrics

In order to create the right metrics, you’ll need to follow these steps:

• Assemble Team: Put together a group of influential stakeholders, which may include a positive maintenance technician, a difficult maintenance technician, a maintenance supervisor, a store manager, and a reliability engineer.

• Create Vision and Mission: This group should put together a vision and mission statement that supports the company’s overall vision.

• Step-by-Step: The team should establish interim goals and targets because you can’t go from zero to hero overnight.

• Leading/Lagging KPIs: Identify them for all maintenance processes from preventive maintenance to failure reporting. Identify consistent definitions and measurements using something like SMRP, which is essentially a metrics manual.

• Possible Metrics: Examples include measuring what percent of preventive and predictive maintenance was scheduled and executed, what amount of rework was needed on a particular piece of equipment, and when work orders were closed out.

Example of a Proactive Maintenance Process

One example of a proactive maintenance process is the performance of an electric motor. Start by measuring the MTBF. Then make an intervention or improvement to address the discovered issues. Finally, measure on a regular basis, share the progress with all, and strive for world-class standards.

Remember that your end goal is failure elimination on critical equipment. Record and collect accurate data on failures and work to reduce and eliminate them every day. Close work orders with all codes identified, so CMMS data is accurate. 

Striving for World-Class Standards

Be sure to set high standards for your maintenance organization. World-class standards may seem unreachable but strive for them anyway. World-class maintenance costs are low, overtime is low, production delays are low, and production output is high. On the other hand, worst-in-class companies struggle with high maintenance and overtime costs as well as production delays and low output levels.

Consider how much your maintenance and reliability process impacts cost, output, and quality Look at your maintenance cost as a percentage of replacement asset value. Remember that this is industry, operations, and equipment specific. Where do you sit? How can you move in the right direction? 

Start with production and what they require. You have to start with the endgame. Determine things like rate, pressure, overall equipment effectiveness, availability, throughput, and cost. As we continue the process, reliability engineers ensure all asset reliability meets full functional requirements. The maintenance team must maintain equipment to those specifications with repeatable procedures.

Create Scorecards That Provide the "Score"

The most important part of the process is to create scorecards that provide us with a score. Use KPI dashboards as a screensaver. Post them on a big screen in the maintenance shop. Make it the first and last thing technicians see as they arrive and leave work each day. You need to give people the score in the game, and people need to see it all the time.

When your team knows your organization is reaching for world-class goals, is empowered to make needed changes, and sees the score on an ongoing basis, you have a recipe for long-term, improved performance.

Note: This article is based on a webinar “How to Create Maintenance KPI Dashboards to Improve Performance” with Ricky Smith. To view the recording of the webinar, visit this link.