You just left a monthly meeting with your manager and their manager. Everything seemed to go well. You presented the usual reports. Everyone nodded.
A few questions were asked, but nothing out of the ordinary. After all, your team is doing well. Uptime has increased. So has wrench time. You even found a few ways to cut inventory costs.
But something isn’t quite right. It seemed like everyone was only half listening and offered routine criticism before moving on. It’s hard to shake the feeling that maintenance isn’t valued the same way other departments are, no matter how well the team is doing.
Proving the high-level impact of the maintenance program is one of the biggest challenges for asset management leaders.
This article is a guide to translating everyday maintenance KPIs and metrics into insights that make an impression in the boardroom so you can get more support for your team’s goals.
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Why it’s so Difficult to Communicate the Impact of Maintenance
Maintenance reporting is an hourly habit at most facilities. There’s no shortage of numbers, dashboards, and trends to look at. But why is it so difficult to get leadership to value these insights the same way they value data from other departments?
There are a few reasons:
- A lot of maintenance work has a long-term impact, while senior leaders focus on short and medium-term results. Your strategy might pay off five years from now, but VPs and executives are thinking about solving a problem in 12 to 18 months.
- It’s hard to directly connect maintenance to improvements in production, capacity, and other revenue-generating activities. Senior leaders don’t just look for results—they want repeatable ways to operate.
- You might lack visibility into higher-level priorities and goals. If you don’t know how higher-ups measure success, there’s no way to connect your KPIs to that definition.
- Senior leaders often see maintenance as a cost center. This seeps through to their views on maintenance metrics.
Let’s explore how to get around these roadblocks with reporting that gets your team the validation and investment it deserves.
A framework for translating maintenance metrics into business outcomes
Linking maintenance metrics and KPIs to financial impact is the quickest way to elevate your reporting and get the attention of more senior leaders and executives. Here are a few ways to translate common maintenance metrics into business outcomes:
| Maintenance metric | Financial impact | How maintenance impacts it |
| Clean start ups | Reduction in cost per unit | Clean start ups mean higher throughput and quality with fewer costs, which reduces the cost of production. |
| Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) | Higher throughput and profit margins | A higher OEE means machines produce more products for less money, which increases profit margins. |
| Preventive maintenance compliance | Increased production capacity and units produced | Preventive maintenance reduces the amount of downtime so equipment can run more and create more products. |
| Unplanned downtime per asset | Cost and revenue certainty | Less unplanned maintenance means more predictable production, costs, and revenue. |
| Planned maintenance percentage | Labor efficiency, return on asset investment | The more time your team spends on planned activities, the more effectively your equipment will be able to produce at max capacity. |
| Spare parts availability | Production and cost efficiency | 72% of maintenance leaders say the cost of downtime has increased because parts cost more, so keeping critical parts available impacts the total cost of production. |
| Failed inspections | Reduced CapEx | Failed inspections lead to maintenance that increases the useful life of an asset and reduces capital expenditures. |
| Standard maintenance cost per unit | Revenue per unit, revenue growth rate | Reducing the cost of maintenance increases the revenue of each unit and accelerates revenue growth. |
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How to Talk About Maintenance ROI Like a Business Leader
The words you use to communicate your strategy also shape how maintenance is viewed at your company. Here are some prompts to transform floor-level wins into programs worthy of extra resources.
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Instead of…
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Say this…
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We’re doing more preventive maintenance.
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We’re increasing production capacity by reducing unplanned equipment stoppages.
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We reduced machine downtime.
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We increased throughput X% and reduced cost per unit Y% by boosting equipment availability.
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We cut inventory costs.
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We reduced the cost of every maintenance activity by X% with a more efficient inventory strategy.
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We’re finding and fixing more failures before they happen.
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We’re reducing our reliance on reactive maintenance and making both costs and production more predictable.
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We improved our SOPs, training, and systems
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We created a repeatable system for asset management that can be applied across sites, boost capacity, and reduce time-to-value for new facilities.
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Building a Maintenance Impact Score to Show the Value of Maintenance
A Maintenance Impact Score is a structured way to measure the value of your maintenance program and communicate it to senior leaders and executives. The Maintenance Impact Score analyzes the work done in five key areas:
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Category
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Key measures
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Costs: How maintenance reduces costs across the facility and company
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Inventory costs, total maintenance costs, maintenance cost per unit, cost of unplanned downtime
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Efficiency: How maintenance maximizes labor resources
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Planned maintenance percentage, Planned maintenance compliance, mean time to repair, units per labor hour
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Capacity: How maintenance increases the amount of quality goods produced
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OEE, asset utilization, unplanned downtime, clean start ups, throughput
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Asset health: How maintenance keeps assets available in the short and long-term
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Failed inspections, mean time between failure, work order completion rate
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Risk reduction: How maintenance reduces the amount of risk to people, equipment, and revenue
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Regulatory compliance, training coverage, failure rate, SOP coverage, asset availability
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Here’s an example of what a Maintenance Impact Score might look like:
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Category
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Key measures
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Costs
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Cost of unplanned downtime: Reduced month-over-month costs by $30,000 by focusing on clean start-ups.
Total maintenance costs: Reduced overall maintenance costs $50,000 by identifying a less expensive vendor for parts
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Efficiency
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Planned maintenance percentage: Increased PMP from 72% to 84% year-to-date, spending 288 more hours on preventive tasks.
Mean time to repair: Reduced mean time to repair on planned tasks by 14% compared to annual average after cross-training programs.
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Capacity
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Asset utilization: Reached 98.7% asset utilization (up from 97.9% QoQ) by increasing PMP and reducing MTTR.
Throughput and yield: Strategies implemented in last 60 days (training, more inspections) increased throughput 12% and yield 23%, resulting in a $140,000 drop in production costs.
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Asset health
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Failed inspections: Failed inspections increased 26% MoM due to extra training sessions. This included finding a failure that allowed us to maintain 96% availability on production assets.
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Risk reduction
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Training coverage: Reached 100% completion on a new cross-training program, allowing us to increase the capacity of key production assets.
Regulatory compliance: Submitted audit materials for SQF compliance on time.
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Use data to elevate the impact of maintenance at your company
You likely have all the information you need to communicate the value of maintenance at the highest levels of your organization. Elevating that data requires you to put it into language that connects to the main priorities of senior leaders.
Understand your leaders’ primary objectives, then work backwards to tie your maintenance activities to them. Go beyond accomplishments to show what led to those gains and how they can be scaled.
You might spend a few more hours working on dashboards, spreadsheets, and presentation decks, but the return on this investment will be well worth it.
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