Surprise equipment breakdowns are a huge headache. They stop jobs, frustrate customers, and cost your business serious money. That’s why preventive maintenance is so important, and so is tracking the proper maintenance KPIs.
Preventive maintenance is about fixing small problems before they can become expensive ones. It also protects your bottom line as a field service business, giving you a recurring revenue stream you can count on every month.
To know if your program is working properly, you need to track preventive maintenance key performance indicators. These KPIs can help you connect the dots between your customers’ needs and your bottom-line revenue numbers.
Let’s look at some essential maintenance KPIs and why they are important to track as you build your preventive maintenance programs.
1. First-Time Fix Rate
First-time Fix Rate might be on every preventive maintenance KPI list, but that’s because of its importance to field service businesses. A high First-Time Fix Rate means your teams are solving problems on the first visit. It’s a way of measuring how prepared your technicians are for jobs, whether they have the proper parts, equipment, and tools, and if they’re qualified enough.
It also reflects on your dispatchers who are scheduling the technicians to ensure they are sending qualified technicians.
The simple calculation is the number of jobs you complete on the first visit, divided by the total number of calls you take, and multiplied by 100.
A high First-Time Fix Rate can also be a clear sign your preventive maintenance program is working. Regular maintenance checks reduce surprise breakdowns. And the more preventative maintenance calls you take, the better you get at:
- Scheduling them with the right skilled technician
- Ordering the parts needed so they are available on time
- Diagnosing problems before they happen
2. Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
Mean time to repair is the average time it takes to fix a broken piece of equipment. From start to finish, how long does it take for your technicians to get the job done?
This KPI is about speed and efficiency. The lower your MTTR, the less downtime for your customers’ equipment. But that also means you’re spending less time on single repairs and can take on more jobs. That helps grow your bottom line.
For preventative maintenance programs, a low MTTR is essential. It means your team is making repairs faster, and that’s generally because you do regular inspections and service.
When you regularly conduct preventative maintenance, few big issues will arise, as you’ll notice them well beforehand. You can then schedule maintenance before it becomes an actual problem.
Plus, with field service software helping you, you can also track all your maintenance and records, enabling your teams to complete maintenance faster. They can go through previous reports, find recurring issues, and read solution notes to get the job done quickly.
3. Planned Maintenance Percentage
This preventive maintenance KPI is one of the most important numbers to track, as it will tell you if you’re a proactive or a reactive service team.
Planned maintenance percentage measures the amount of time your team spends on planned work compared to unplanned work.
Planned work is preventative maintenance, like scheduled inspections, cleanings, filter changes, and regular tune-ups. Unplanned work includes emergency breakdowns, sudden failures, and other service calls that have customers on the phone in a panic.
If your goal as a field service business is to move away from stressful, time-consuming emergency calls, planned maintenance percentage is important.
Emergency calls take up more of your time, can cause delays in other repairs, and often require multiple visits to order the proper parts.
Having a high planned maintenance percentage proves your preventive maintenance strategy is working. It gives you the power to choose when you do work, which means:
- Less stress on your teams to complete repairs
- Lower costs
- Happier customers because you avoid surprise downtimes
80% is generally considered the benchmark you want to reach. Simply take the total hours spent on all planned work, and divide by all the hours you spend on all maintenance activities to get your percentage.
4. Average Response Time
When a service call comes in, how quickly does your team react to the problem? That’s what’s calculated in your average response time. This may not seem like a standard preventative maintenance KPI, but it can be a good indicator of how well your maintenance program is working.
If you are always chasing emergency break/fix repairs because your customer equipment keeps failing, your technicians are going to be tied up in that work. And when you start to notice this trend, it’s a good time to get that customer covered by your preventative maintenance plan.
The clock starts the moment the customer calls in an issue and stops the second your technician arrives on-site. By seeing your average response time, you can see how well you dispatch.
Are you able to move technicians around to cover an emergency? Can you reschedule planned maintenance for another time?
If you look at the customer level, you can see who has higher response times. These customers should be covered on one of your plans to reduce the potential for emergency fixes.
While this isn’t exactly a standard KPI for preventative maintenance plans, it can be a valuable upselling number and an indicator of how much emergency work you do.
5. Technician Utilization Rate
The main goal for every technician is to make them as productive as possible. You want them to spend their time actually fixing and repairing, and less time driving, waiting for parts, or talking on the phone to diagnose problems.
A high utilization rate means technicians are working, and more importantly, bringing in revenue. If you are using a preventative maintenance strategy, work is scheduled ahead of time, which allows you to:
- Reduce driving routes
- Make sure the right parts are ready at the site or in the warehouse
- Give technicians a full, steady day of productive work
You don’t want your technicians wasting valuable time. You may discover your technicians are driving too far, don’t have the right tools or parts, or simply are the wrong tech for the job.
Additionally, as you add more technicians under a preventive maintenance plan, you can assign a dollar value to the revenue they will generate. This lets you forecast revenue more accurately and start scaling your business with limited risk.
Preventive Maintenance KPIs Are Essential For a Proactive Business
Preventive maintenance is a strategy that many companies in the field service industry are taking more seriously. It can prove to be a valuable investment for your customers, while also providing a solid foundation for revenue growth.
If you want to try and track all of these preventive maintenance KPIs on paper, you’ll miss valuable data that can tell you how your program is performing. By using a field service software, you’ll get automatic updates on your most valuable KPIs so you can take immediate action.
Fieldpoint’s Business Intelligence and reporting functions allow you to build out your KPIs into dashboards that help you make business decisions quickly and with more confidence. Build reports and KPIs that speak to your business.
See how Fieldpoint can take the guesswork out of planned maintenance and make you a truly proactive service provider.