Are Green metrics Hiding Poor Asset Management Practice?

You achieve 90% schedule compliance within your maintenance organization…Great! That means you’re achieving World-Class Standards right?

While you’re killing it at face value, when you scratch the surface of this benchmark, what’s there? Could you be scheduling more work to achieve greater capacity from resources… are your assets being maintained at an optimal level under this current model?

Of course, measurement is key to performance improvements, and a “green” Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is good – that means you’re hitting the goal. But it is only good so long as the goal is relevant to broader business objectives and drives the right behaviours in the maintenance team.

It’s important to be on the lookout for dangerous KPIs – that is: targets that are misleading, misunderstood or of no value to the organization.

Achieving targets makes you look good, but unless those key metrics effectively measure asset health or reliability or stability, they’re just hiding poor performance; having targets in play that are ineffective measures of asset health can be misleading for their contribution to your objectives.

It’s also fairly commonplace to have departmental KPIs that have… just always been there. And because they’re always positive, no one asks any questions. If you’re always hitting targets without understanding how, or why, they deliver zero value to the organization.

How to Evaluate your Key Performance Indicators

It’s worthwhile to consider a review of your maintenance plan, to make sure your KPIs are built around predictive and preventative maintenance strategies and behaviours that will optimize asset stability.

A good way to look at it is: ‘measure what you treasure’; such as:

Cost savings:

• % overtime, maintenance labour
• % overtime, maintenance labour
• %Contractor Maintenance Labour costs

Equipment Reliability:

• Mean time between failures
• % Emergency work

The Maintenance Backlog

Keep in mind, that the work done by the Maintenance group needs to support business aims and operating strategy. Ideally, maintenance performance is clearly linked to the reason your company is in business. It is also important that these KPIs are those that can be controlled by the maintenance group or nominated team responsible for meeting them.

It may be tempting to stick to those comfy, old measures – especially if you know you can confidently achieve them. However, as your organization matures, it’s important to review performance targets to ensure they encourage the right behaviors; that they contribute to business performance and process improvements, and maintenance goals that are aligned with corporate KPIs and best practice.