Three figures every management team should know

Management tends to look at maintenance as a line of expense: a global number compared against last year’s, always looking high. That single figure doesn’t let you decide anything, or defend anything.

There are three that do. None of them is hard to get, and almost no company has them.

1. How much each asset costs

Not the department’s cost: the accumulated cost of each piece of equipment, adding up hours and material over the years.

What it’s for. The most expensive decision in maintenance: whether a machine gets repaired again or replaced. Without this figure you decide by gut feeling or available budget; with it, you decide with the history in front of you.

What it takes to have it. Hours measured with a stopwatch inside the work order — not from memory at the end of the day — material consumed against the warehouse when the order is closed, and the order linked to the asset.

The detail that shapes it. The warehouse’s valuation method — average cost, actual cost, FIFO or LIFO — determines exactly what that figure means. It’s worth knowing which one is in use.

In GMAO CLOUD there’s also an automatic alert: an asset has its replacement cost and a percentage recorded, and the system notifies you when the accumulated repair spend exceeds it.

2. Which contract makes money

If you provide maintenance services, this is the figure that surprises people most the first time they see it.

What it’s for. There’s almost always a type of contract or job being sold below what it costs, and it’s been that way for years because nobody had the hours measured. Finding it can change an entire renewal.

What it takes. Hours per client and time entries, plus the deviation between estimated and actual time, the indicator that gives away which jobs are being quoted badly.

What doesn’t get counted and should. Second visits — going back for missing material or information — and travel time. It gets paid for twice and is rarely logged.

3. What proportion is preventive and what is corrective

The third is the most honest of all, because it can’t be dressed up in a single quarter.

What it’s for. It describes better than any other figure whether the operation is proactive or reactive. And it’s the one that lets you defend a budget: a plan that gets executed turns spending into something predictable, and predictable spending can be planned.

What it takes. Work classified by origin, and no tasks that aren’t really maintenance — errands, paperwork, escorting a supplier — sneaking into the plan, because they inflate the percentage of plan executed and make the ratio look better than it is.

How long it takes to move. Months. If it jumps in a single quarter, it’s probably being measured wrong.

The fourth figure, for anyone with a regulatory obligation

If you have equipment subject to regulation, there’s one more figure that isn’t financial and gets looked at before the other three: the percentage of the annual plan executed.

It’s the one shown during an inspection, along with the completed checklists and the dated documentation. Worth remembering that legal maintenance isn’t a module: it’s achieved through the preventive maintenance mechanism with the schedule the regulation requires.

Where all four come from

From the reports, and all of them depend on the same thing: someone recording the data when it happened.

If hours are jotted down from memory and material is logged on Friday, the four figures still exist, but they describe a reality that never happened. That’s why recording in the field — from the app, which works without coverage — isn’t an operational detail: it’s the requirement everything else depends on.

The ones you shouldn’t ask for

By symmetry, and because asking for too many indicators is a well-known way to end up with none.

A dashboard with thirty figures. Nobody looks at it. The usefulness of an indicator isn’t in how much data it shows, but in the specific decision it enables.

Activity indicators without context. How many work orders closed this month says nothing on its own: it can mean the team is doing great or that there have been a lot of breakdowns.

Percentages compared to industry averages. They come from other studies of different operations and say nothing about yours. The useful comparison is against yourself, last year.

Any figure that isn’t tied to a decision. If nobody is going to do anything differently depending on whether it comes out high or low, it’s excess.

How to use them, and how not to

A one-hour quarterly review with the four figures in front of you is enough. Out of it come concrete decisions: which schedules to move up or down, which assets have stopped being worth repairing, and which contracts to renegotiate.

And a warning worth taking seriously: hours-per-technician indicators are for sizing teams and budgeting, not for evaluating anyone. The moment they get used for that, the recorded times stop being real and all four figures become useless.

Same with the executed plan: if it turns into a personal target, the shortest route isn’t to actually meet it better — it’s closing orders that were never done.

What you can do with them

So they don’t end up on a panel nobody looks at, here are the specific decisions each one enables.

With cost per asset: replace it or keep repairing it, and with what priority within the year’s investment budget.

With profitability per contract: renegotiate the price, adjust the scope of what’s contracted, or — sometimes — stop renewing it. It’s the one that moves the most money and the one that’s most uncomfortable the first time.

With the preventive-to-corrective ratio: size the team and defend the budget, because a plan that gets executed turns spending into something predictable.

With the plan executed: adjust the size of the plan. If it’s well below target, the answer isn’t to push harder — it’s to cut back, starting with the over-maintained equipment — the assets that have gone through several cycles without a single anomaly.

If you don’t have any of the four

That’s the usual situation, and you don’t need a big project to get started. With critical assets registered, their maintenance schedules and frequency set, and recording happening in the field, the fourth figure appears within the first month and the first three over the course of the first year.

The one thing you can’t do is recover them retroactively: the months that weren’t recorded don’t exist.

And there’s one more figure you can have from day one without recording anything: how much was spent last year on unplanned interventions. It’s in the invoices, it’s verifiable, and it’s usually a lot higher than anyone assumed. As a starting point for a conversation with management, it works better than any percentage from a brochure.

If you want to see what figures your own operation would produce, you can request a demo.