After getting maintenance activities completed in the plant and documented in Maximo, most organizations want to understand what they’ve got done. Going beyond summary reports – number of work orders closed, dollars spent per month, etc., most organizations look to key performance indicators (KPI’s) and metrics to help them understand what is happening in their plant or facility. Getting measurements on activities related to Maintenance can be daunting task. Do a Google search on 'maintenance KPI and metrics' and you’re likely to have a melt down on all the information that is available. Like most organizations, you’re likely to want to report on the big name metrics like OEE, MTTR, and MTBF. Before an organization tackles one of these metrics, they should make sure they can report on more fundamental metrics. The idea is similar to the old saying, ‘walk before you run’, so here are some steps on getting started.

First, take a look at some fundamental metrics to see if you have consistent data reporting occurring in Maximo. If you don’t have good data, you won’t have good measurements to rely on. Three common metrics an organization could use are:

1. Monthly work type by hours: This metric looks at all the work orders an organization completed in a month, grouped by work order type, then summarizing the documented time spent on each work order. This metric helps understand what type of work got completed and which type was done most often. To get a complete picture of this metric, an organization would need to see if the following is occurring:
   • Do we require all work orders to have a work type?
   • Do we have work types to properly describe the work being done?
   • Do we capture all activities on a work order or only some of them?
   • Do we capture time on all work orders?
2. Manpower utilization: This metric looks at how much of a manpower’s available time was documented on a work order, over a given period of time. This metric helps an organization understand how well manpower is being scheduled or if there are gaps in documentation. Some questions that could be raised around this metric are:
   • Do we have accurate schedules of manpower in Maximo?
   • Are we capturing all the activities being done in the plant in Maximo?
   • Do we have inaccurate recording of manpower time (e.g. man hours are documented for a mechanic on a day they weren’t scheduled)
3. Work orders closed with costs & zero man hours: This metric is used to see if work orders are getting closed with charged parts or materials, but no manpower time was documented with the work. Depending on the volume of work orders closed, some questions that may get raised are:
   • At what point in the closure process are we allowing an informational gap to occur that allows a work order to be closed with parts or materials charged, but no man hours.
   • Are there known exceptions we should exclude from the metric?
   • Are there steps we could enforce the rule (e.g. conditional security to not allow work order closure when costs exist)?

Some good sources on examples of maintenance related KPI’s and metrics to use:

• USG’s article on 20 KPI’s in their corporate score card: Part I article / Part II article.
• SMRP has a collection of industry recognized KPI and Metric that can be purchased: SMRP Metric Library.
• How to Begin Measuring Maintenance Effectiveness: Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

Over the next couple of posts, we’ll take a look developing these into either a dashboard KPI for the Maximo start center or reporting metrics from a BIRT report, so the information can be run understood straight from Maximo.