How to Measure Maintenance Productivity

Improving the productivity of your maintenance team is one of the top goals of MPulse customers. But what is maintenance productivity—and how do you measure it?

Maintenance directly affects the productivity of organizations. After all, if an asset isn’t working, it’s not producing.

But maintenance productivity will look different to different organizations.

What is Maintenance Productivity?

Productivity is the rate of output per unit of input. In other words, if you have XX number of employees and use XX supplies or resources, you can produce XX products or services.

Measuring productivity—and specifically maintenance productivity—depends on what’s important to you and your organization.

For example, MPulse customer Ari uses billable hours to measure productivity. In his case, his maintenance team is serving external customers who pay for the services they use. Maintenance techs aim for an 80 percent billable rate—which means 80 percent of their time is directly billed to customers, while 20 percent is breaks, vacation, training, etc.

But productivity can be any number of things, including…

  • Operating hours
  • Equipment uptime
  • Cost control
  • Time or cost savings
  • Asset life cycle
  • Quality
  • Reduction in risk, safety, or environmental impact

Whatever maintenance productivity means to you, CMMS software can help you with maintenance productivity and performance measurements.

How CMMS Software Measures Maintenance Productivity

Whatever you decide to measure, CMMS software gives you the tools you need to determine if your maintenance team is doing the right things to support or improve productivity—and if they’re doing those things correctly. This way you will be able to measure maintenance effectiveness.

For example, Ari uses his CMMS data to identify if his team has what they need to do their jobs—such as the right training, the correct tools or equipment, the necessary time to complete their tasks, and the right materials to do the job.

Ari also measures planned versus unplanned maintenance and number of “comebacks”—or work that needs to be redone because something wasn’t fixed completely the first time. He also looks at wrench time versus billable hours to see if his team is producing what they should be.

And, finally, Ari compares the actual time his team members take to complete specific maintenance tasks, and then compares it to benchmarks using MPulse’s maintenance productivity software. Over time, he can see if his team is performing these tasks faster, indicating that maintenance productivity is improving.

Related Article: How Are Your Maintenance Management Goals?

How do you measure maintenance productivity, or how do you want to measure it? Leave a comment or contact us. We can help.