Bethan Foston Date published: Dec 12, 22

A type of Key Performance Indicator (KPI), facility management metrics can help you define what ‘success’ looks like for your organization, taking a simple concept and attaching a value to it. They can be used for nearly all tasks, from the time wasted on reoccurring incidents and your day-to-day repairs, to the efficiency of your building maintenance or performance of your equipment.

Facility management metrics are essential to reflect how a business is performing, though it can be tricky to decide what metrics you should be measuring. In this blog, we explain how tracking these 5-facility management KPIs can help you to identify operational gaps, highlighting why they should be of utmost importance to your business.

Average work order completion times

How long does it take your team to complete a work order? And does that time vary depending on whether it’s a reactive or proactive request? This key facility maintenance metric can help you determine any gaps in your processes. For example, if it takes your team 8 days to fix an electrical issue but far longer to fix a plumbing one, it may mean there’s a skill gap in your plumbing team.

With information like this available, not only will you know where improvements need to be made, but you will also have insight into the efficiency of your workforce. In the long term, this can help you to make future decisions about your staffing or budget.

Ratio of employees to work orders

Do you know how many work orders were completed in your business last year? Or even during the last quarter? Are your staff struggling to complete the amount of work orders you have? Answering these questions is vital. Most importantly, this metric can help you to detect the likeliness of employee burnout; if you have too much work but not enough people to do it, stress levels are likely to be higher and job satisfaction will likely take a hit. If this is the case, this metric will have helped you to identify the need for an additional resource, helping to improve productivity and prioritization of staff wellbeing.

What’s more, it can also help give grounds for additional budget requests, in the event that your work orders have grown, by demonstrating to stakeholders how well the business is performing. An easy metric to understand, this KPI can really help get your message across to those who may not be involved in the day-to-day running of your facility.

Amount of reactive work orders by asset

Understanding how your assets are performing will highlight where the focus should be in your preventive maintenance program, whilst also predicting if there is a need to invest in new machinery and equipment in the future. You can do this by gathering data points for the number of reactive orders by asset, which can be collected weekly, monthly and quarterly. For instance, if you have two furnaces put into service simultaneously but one has over half as many reactive work orders than the other, it shows that there is a clear discrepancy between the two and, as such, you are prevented from operating at maximum efficiency.

Looking at reactive work orders by asset will indicate how your equipment is affecting your bottom line. This will help you decide whether it is time to replace or repair an asset. According to Plant Engineering, 42% of unscheduled downtime is due to equipment failure. This metric can help you to identify if replacing your equipment is a necessary investment to see a future increase in profits.

Time spent on reactive vs preventive maintenance

If you’re constantly having to carry out reactive maintenance tasks, you will be reducing your ability to operate efficiently. This can increase cost and negatively impact the quality of work that your staff are producing, given that they are jumping from one issue to the next.

Being aware of how long your team is spending on reactive tasks vs preventive maintenance, from your array of trend data, helps you to establish where the reoccurring issues are. You can then take action to optimize workloads, fixing issues at the source, so there are less reactive work orders. A lot of businesses track this monthly, allowing them to make changes in real-time, and reduce costs where they need to.

Adherence to service-level agreements such as time to respond

Service-level agreements (SLAs) can show how quickly your workforce is responding to work orders, which is an important facility maintenance data point for increasing satisfaction amongst both customers and stakeholders in your business. Without measuring these, you’ll have no way to know if the service you are providing is of the highest quality.

For instance, you might want to measure the time it takes your employees to respond to a service ticket raised. If an employee raises a ticket regarding a broken computer, a device which is critical for the completion of their work, and that ticket wasn’t addressed until 3 days later, this could have a huge knock-on effect to the timeline of a project. A slow response time to issues is likely to cause delays in getting the final product to a customer. 

To better keep track of your facility management issues and the amount of tickets being raised, a fully digital platform for reporting issues on-the-go, is the way forward.

Having to manually track your KPIs is nothing short of laborious and unnecessary. Revolutionise the way you work with our Mobile Inspection Solution.