The effectiveness of your maintenance team is a great indicator of your overall facility performance. If your maintenance team is overworked and undervalued, that’s a good sign that your facility is facing growing pains (or is aging quickly). However, if your maintenance team is on top of work orders and has a short backlog, signs point toward a healthy and productive facility.
You can learn tremendously from your work order data. By analyzing downtime, wrench time, labor costs, and equipment performance, you can learn a great deal about the inner workings of your facility. However, when you ignore these data points, you are only setting yourself at a disadvantage. If you want to learn your facility inside and out, follow these steps for using work order data to improve facility performance:
Define your goal.
There are hundreds of data points to analyze in your maintenance program. You could study wrench time, costs of reactive maintenance, or labor hours, but without context, these numbers won’t help you improve. What do you want to accomplish this year with your maintenance team? Do you want to:
- Strengthen your preventative maintenance program
- Create a more lean strategy for maintenance
- Reduce downtime and reactive maintenance costs
- Grow your maintenance department on pace with the rest of your facility
Once you define your maintenance goals for the year, you can move on to determining your key performance indicators.
Choose KPIs
Not all data will be useful in reaching your goals. Depending on the size of your maintenance team, you may want to stick to three to five KPIs in order to narrow your focus and create a practical plan for your ground floor staff. Some KPIs for small to midsize maintenance teams can include:
- Percentage of reactive vs. preventive repairs
- Frequency of reactive repairs per month
- Number of expected versus actual labor/overtime
- Costs of reactive repairs and increase/decrease over time
- Number of daily work orders in the backlog
Build your maintenance strategy around these measurements.
Once you’ve determined the metrics you want to try and improve within your maintenance team, it’s time to put that plan into action. Brainstorm with your maintenance team leads to determine what actions can be taken to reach your goals along with key performance metrics. For example, if your goal is to reduce the daily backlog, you can devise a plan to clear out the backlog or to improve the work order management system speed.
Implement “big picture” ideas into day-to-day operations.
Once you’ve determined your strategy and KPIs, you can implement daily solutions to reach toward your bigger goals. Improvements are achieved one day at a time and can accumulate when everyone on the maintenance staff is on board. When you work together to achieve your bigger goals, you can see them work faster and more smoothly than when implementing a top-down approach.
MaintenX believes that work order management is the key to any successful preventative maintenance program. That’s why we use a fully automated work order system that gets your work order request from dispatch to inspection in only a matter of hours. To learn more about our preventative maintenance system, contact your local MaintenX team today.
