Discussing Leading and Lagging Indicators In Maintenance Management

Virtually the entire world has been affected by COVID-19. By now, there is a good chance your operation has changed – perhaps dramatically. Whether it’s a partial shutdown, focus on certain products, emphasis on working from home, or something else, you may be struggling with the changes. Maybe you are at home looking into how to support the operation remotely.

One aspect of maintenance that could be looked at during this time is the performance of the department. Key Process Indicators (KPIs) are typically used to measure maintenance execution.

Reviewing your KPIs could be a valuable task, and help you understand more about how well your maintenance strategy is working. A thorough review of maintenance KPIs could help to improve your plant maintenance, even while not running.

Typical KPIs Are Lagging

You may be familiar with many traditional KPIs in maintenance. Some basic examples are maintenance department spend, or maintenance backlog in hours of time for work.

There are plenty of KPIs that can help you gain deeper insights into maintenance performance. This means going more in-depth than simplistic measures like maintenance spend.

Some more meaningful KPIs include:

• Maintenance cost as a percentage of replacement asset value. (World class operations have this percentage less than 2%)
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is one metric many businesses use for a comprehensive measure of the operation. Put simply, this measure is calculated by multiplying availability (inverse of downtime), performance (how much output versus target), and quality (yield of good output). For more information, there is a detailed explanation here.
• Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is calculated by dividing the downtime length by the total number of downtime events. MTTR can be used to determine criticality of an asset, or areas where preventive tasks need to be added.
• Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is the average time between failures on an asset. This is an important indicator to determine maintenance priorities.

These KPIs are certainly worth measuring, but they do have one main drawback: they are lagging indicators. Meaning, by tracking them you are only measuring past performance – you cannot use them to know where you will be a week, month, or year from now.

Leading Indicators

Consider establishing some leading metrics. These KPIs are forward looking and help to predict the outcome of a process.

You can think of it this way. In an example where a person is trying to lose weight, the lagging indicator would be to step on the scale. On the other hand, leading indicator would be to track calories consumed and burned.

So, how do you set up and track leading indicators? The first area to look at may be the schedule.

• Schedule Compliance is an indicator of how well the schedule is being followed. If schedule adherence is low, you can see that the work being missed will create future potential problems.
• Planned Maintenance Percentage is a metric that tracks how much of your maintenance work is planned. The best operations will aim for 80% or higher planned hours. When planned maintenance is the large majority, the maintenance department is operating more efficiently. More importantly, equipment should be running smoothly and producing profit!

For a condition-based maintenance (CBM) or a predictive maintenance approach, you may want to also measure some indicators of the programs themselves.

• Open Alerts is a measure of the number of alerts generated by condition monitors or predictive models. It is a simple indicator of potential upcoming issues.
• Percent of Predictive Recommendations Implemented can be a measure of how much importance has been granted to either condition alerts or the predictive models, and whether they are providing valuable work.

Using a CMMS to Augment Your Performance

When implementing these KPIs – whether leading or lagging – maintenance software like a CMMS can be valuable. With the software deployed, you can help set a schedule for leading indicators and generate reports to help measure maintenance performance.

It can be difficult to track any of the advanced KPIs without these tools. Therefore, it is recommended that CMMS is used to generate the data for both leading and lagging indicators.

Conclusion

If you are only tracking lagging maintenance indicators, it can be difficult to comprehend your overall maintenance performance. To help improve performance, establish some leading indicators – these metrics can reveal future events.

Ideally, your KPIs should be a mixture between leading and lagging indicators for a comprehensive measure of performance. A thorough review of critical KPIs could be a beneficial activity for your operation.