When clear goals are set, and the maintenance team knows what actions are needed, sharing progress through a KPI dashboard is a superb way to align everyone.
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.
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.
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.
