Which maintenance metrics should a plant manager review?
Choose a small set of measures that connects equipment results to the work process, rather than judging performance by PM completion alone.
What to look for
A useful starting view combines unplanned downtime and repeat failures with planned versus emergency work, schedule compliance and backlog health. Define each measure consistently, identify its owner and compare it with the plant’s own baseline.
Practical next steps
- Investigate trends and exceptions with the people doing the work.
- Separate completed work from work that prevented a failure or resolved a known risk.
- Check whether missing or inconsistent work-order data could distort the result.
No single target fits every facility. Use measures to guide questions and decisions, and avoid rewarding numbers in ways that encourage poor closeout or deferred work.
A balanced starting set
- Equipment outcomes: unplanned downtime and repeat failures on selected critical assets. Confirm how downtime starts and ends.
- Work mix: emergency and planned work, using a consistent definition and, where possible, labor hours as well as counts.
- Schedule reliability: completed scheduled work against work scheduled for the same period; record why work was displaced.
- Backlog health: age, risk, estimated hours and work ready to schedule versus work awaiting prerequisites.
- PM effectiveness: completion alongside defects found, follow-up completion and failures despite PM.
Turn metrics into decisions
Choose owners and agree on definitions before comparing periods or facilities. Review the trend with supervisors, planners and technicians: “What changed, what is the evidence, and who owns the next action?” Use a representative sample of work orders to check whether coding and closeout quality support the measure.
A high PM completion percentage can coexist with repeat failures if tasks do not address the failure mode or defects are not corrected. Avoid treating a single number as a complete picture of reliability.
Explore the assessment
See how KANE approaches this work and what an engagement includes.
View the related assessment →Related answer: Why do equipment failures happen even when preventive maintenance is completed?