The "key" thing about performance indicators

KPI is a term that gets thrown around pretty freely these days, normally it gets used to refer to every single metric that an organization uses or can think of.

In reality it means what it says, the KEY measure to tell you what you need to know about performance, costs, process accuracy or whatever else you may need to review.

This begs the question, what would actually be the KEY performance indicator of your plant or process?



Not the cost KPI, but the actual "KPI" the one thing above all else that tells you how you are going as a maintenance department.

If you read through the books written on metrics today you find lots of great and intriguing stuff on work process measures, efficiency measures, cost measures and so forth. All of these depending very heavily on data from CMMS programs. programs that invariably do not contain the data required... and all of which miss the point tragically.

Physical asset management today is a sophisticated managerial discipline and one covering a swathe of additional areas. But more than anything else it is the elimination, reduction and mitigation of events causing downtime that is most important to us.

Because only when the machines are operating can we do whatever it is that we are in business to do. Regardless of whether this is a rail activity, water utility, mining organization, process plant or manufacturing plant.

They only make money when they are producing. Not when they are being repaired.

This is where most books on metrics fall off the rails, and why most KPI programs fail to make a real dent on issues like net present value, profitability and revenue increases.

The real measure of the maintenance impact is on uptime measures. measures such as Availability and MTBF are good, of course, but they tend to be a little abstract for people who don't deal with maintenance and production issues daily.

What is needed is a measure of how much revenue was lost or not made due to asset failures in the previous period. (24 hours, a week, a month, whatever) This needs to be in dollars (or sheckles or whatever) and needs to be presented to management regularly.

Tends to sharpen managements appetite for change and for positive action when they are faced with the real, quantified, dollar impact to the top line.

Sadly, has nothing to do with the data held most CMMS programs, in fact the data for it often sits with production or operations.

I will be posting on this from time to time because it is a very, very important issue - and one that even the largest of companies tend to fall over when they implement it.

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