You have already implemented your preventive maintenance plan. But do you know if it’s working or failing? Can you prove to the management that your work is paying off?
There are three performance indicators that help you measure the efficiency of your planned preventive maintenance — the planned maintenance percentage, the preventive maintenance compliance rate, and the critical scheduled maintenance percentage — that tell us if you are really succeeding or not. And since there’s always the other side of the coin, they also give us an indication of the reasons why your planned preventive maintenance may not be working.
Without further ado, let’s see how to calculate each of these indicators and what they tell you about the effectiveness (or lack thereof!) of your preventive maintenance plan.
Planned Maintenance Percentage
If the indicator analysis of a preventive maintenance plan was like a health checkup, the planned maintenance percentage would be like a hemogram – a routine test that we should do regularly and that is a good indicator of the state of our immune system. Besides, calculating the planned maintenance percentage isn’t that hard. Simply divide the number of hours you spend on planned preventive maintenance by the total hours spent on maintenance in total (thus including reactive maintenance). Here’s the formula:
If the planned maintenance percentage is less than 85%, your company needs to take more exams and perhaps an emergency trip. But what does a low planned maintenance percentage mean?
Lack of focus on preventive maintenance
If your planned maintenance percentage is less than 85%, it means that you are spending at least 15% of your time on reactive maintenance. In other words, your maintenance technicians spend 15% of their time fixing faults that could have been prevented. Read our article on how to create a maintenance plan to learn how you can avoid this.
Preventive Maintenance Compliance
If your company already has a preventive maintenance plan, it is the Preventive Maintenance Compliance (PMC) that tells us if your preventive maintenance plan is efficient or still needs some adjustments.
It is calculated by dividing the number of tasks performed by the number of planned tasks and multiplying it by 100. Often times, the most difficult thing is knowing exactly what was performed, but we trust you know by now that an Intelligent Maintenance Management Platform is a maintenance manager’s dearest friend. Here’s the formula for PMC.
The preventive maintenance plan compliance rate should be 90% to avoid downtime and unnecessary maintenance repair expenses. Lack of compliance with the maintenance plan may indicate that:
You are not using the right technology
It’s impossible to stick to your preventive maintenance plan if you don’t have the right tools with you. Can you imagine a surgery where the surgeon has to leave the room halfway through to get a scalpel? It is important that your technicians have easy access to all the information about the equipment they are going to work on. Excel sheets were a big improvement over paper sheets, but they don’t send reminders, keep track of equipment malfunctions, or facilitate communication between different teams.
You are not optimising your resources and/or your team is inadequately trained
When defining your planned preventive maintenance for your technicians to perform, try putting yourself in their shoes. It is important to understand the routine of these employees in order for them to optimise their time. On the other hand, you may not be making the best use of your employees’ skill set either. Older people have experience to their advantage, but younger employees may be better at dealing with new technology. Understand their strengths and assemble teams that complement each other.
Scheduled maintenance critical percent
The last indicator we want to talk about is the scheduled maintenance critical percent — that is, the percentage of planned preventive maintenance you are doing late. Firstly, we need to break down maintenance tasks into cycles (for example, of 30 or 90 days). Then, we measure whether those days were enough to comply with the plan and, if not, how many extra days it took to complete the tasks:
The critical percentage of scheduled maintenance should be as low as possible. Ideally, there would be 0 days of delay, so the metric would be 100%. But if under normal circumstances, you have many overdue tasks, this is probably a sign of:
Poor task weighing
When certain tasks (for example, the overhaul of all building climate control devices) constantly have a high SMCP, they are probably taking longer than expected or there aren’t enough technicians. In the future, you should aim to allocate more time and human resources to the tasks with the highest SMCP.
Poor priority setting
If any tasks that have a significant impact in your operation are constantly left to-do after their due date, you should reconsider your task prioritisation. Evaluate the criticality of your assets and move the top priority tasks to the top of the list, rather than “burying” them under half a dozen tasks with less impact.
These metrics will surely help you measure the effectiveness of your maintenance plan and understand what factors are affecting the execution of your tasks.
👷 Do you want to know how Infraspeak can help you plan and give you detailed information about your team’s performance and maintenance plans? Visit our website, or get in touch with one of our experts!
