Managing a heavy-duty shop requires much more than technical expertise. Fleet maintenance managers must rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to have a clear overview and make the best decisions. These metrics help reduce costs, optimize resources, and keep the fleet operational. Here are 10 essential metrics that every fleet maintenance manager should monitor carefully:
1. Downtime
Downtime measures the time during which a vehicle or equipment is immobilized due to maintenance work. This period represents a direct loss of revenue because a stopped vehicle or equipment does not generate value. For example, a heavy truck immobilized for an emergency repair will not be able to meet its delivery deadlines, which impacts not only the customer but also the overall profitability of the company.
With fleet maintenance systems like MIR-RT, it’s possible to easily track the status of units in real-time and identify the root causes of the longest downtimes. Regular analysis makes it possible to prioritize actions to minimize downtime, particularly by optimizing spare parts management or strengthening preventive maintenance.
2. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
MTBF is an indicator of your fleet’s overall reliability. It corresponds to the average time between two breakdowns of a vehicle or heavy equipment in your fleet. A higher MTBF reflects a well-maintained fleet with equipment that performs consistently over time.
This KPI is helpful for assessing whether your preventive maintenance intervals are well-adjusted. If the MTBF is consistently lower than expected intervals, this may indicate that certain parts or components are wearing out faster than expected. Using this metric, you can adjust your maintenance strategies to prevent failures.
3. MTTF (Mean Time to Failure)
MTTF, or Mean Time To Failure, often complements MTBF. While the latter focuses on the duration between two repairable failures, the MTTF focuses on the average lifespan before an irreversible failure requiring replacement.
Fleet maintenance managers can better plan their purchases and budgets by analyzing this data. For example, if equipment is nearing the end of its estimated MTTF lifespan, it may be wise to anticipate its replacement to avoid costly repairs or unplanned downtime. When making important decisions, using the data at our disposal is a massive advantage over relying on intuition.
4. Preventive Maintenance Compliance
Compliance with preventive maintenance indicates whether regular maintenance is carried out on time (in days), according to distances travelled or even according to use (engine hours). This KPI is often expressed as a percentage. High compliance (above 90%) shows that the garage is proactive in fleet maintenance management, reducing the risk of unplanned breakdowns.
For example, if a heavy vehicle is not maintained on time, it can accelerate the wear and tear of critical components, such as the brakes or the engine. By monitoring this KPI, you can identify bottlenecks in your maintenance scheduling and adjust your schedules to ensure all maintenance is completed on time.
5. Maintenance Backlog
The backlog represents the accumulation of pending maintenance tasks. The higher this number, the more it may indicate that your garage is overloaded or poorly organized. You can compare this metric to your to-do list. Ideally, we want to reduce it to a minimum, but new tasks are constantly added. Therefore, it is a perpetual struggle to overcome this list.
This KPI helps you understand whether you have enough staff, parts, or equipment to meet demand. Furthermore, a large backlog can also signal problems in priority management. For example, certain tasks could be wrongly postponed even though they are critical to the fleet’s safety.
6. TTR (Time to Repair)
TTR measures the time required to repair a vehicle or equipment after a specific breakdown. This metric is essential for assessing the speed of your internal processes.
By combining TTR with data on repair types, you can identify which tasks take the most time and look for ways to speed up those processes. You can also dig deeper and determine which types of repairs are taking longer than expected so you can make fixes. This could include training staff, improving inventory management or automating specific administrative tasks.
7. MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)
MTTR is the average downtime for all repairs performed over a given period. Unlike the TTR, it provides an overview of the garage’s overall efficiency.
If your MTTR is high, it may indicate a lack of resources, problems in the supply chain, or inefficient processes. Regularly analyzing this KPI helps you uncover actionable insights to minimize heavy vehicle and equipment downtime.
8. Percentage of Planned Maintenance
Ideally, the majority of maintenance tasks should be planned. An 80% preventive maintenance to 20% corrective ratio is often considered the industry standard.
However, unforeseen events complicate this ratio. The planned maintenance percentage allows you to monitor your progress towards this 80% goal and detect areas where you could improve your planning. Planned maintenance avoids costly downtime and helps manage costs and labour more efficiently.
9. Supplier Performance
The availability and reliability of parts are directly linked to the success of a heavy vehicle and equipment garage. To excel at this level, it is crucial to consistently assess your suppliers’ performance. This evaluation can be based on several aspects, such as the speed of deliveries, the quality of the parts, and compliance with negotiated prices.
A bad supplier can significantly impact your operations, causing additional delays and increasing costs. Therefore, it is wise to document any supplier’s failure to have leverage during future price or agreement negotiations. In addition, these reported cases can allow you to weigh each supplier according to different criteria to assign a score to each. By monitoring this metric, you can establish strategic partnerships with reliable suppliers that support your performance goals.
10. Total Cost of Maintenance (TCM)
The total cost of maintenance (TCM) is one of the most comprehensive metrics. It includes labour, spare parts, and heavy vehicle and equipment downtime losses.
Here is the formula to calculate it:
CTM = Labour Costs + Parts Costs + Downtime Costs
By analyzing this financial metric, you can detect sources of excessive spending and explore solutions to reduce your costs. This KPI is easily comparable from year to year, but fluctuations in the size of your fleet are important to take into account when analyzing it, as they have a direct impact on the calculation.
To ensure you track the evolution of your maintenance costs on a comparable basis, you can divide your CTM by the number of units in your fleet to have a maintenance cost per unit.
Conclusion
By integrating these 10 metrics into your daily maintenance management, you can make better decisions to improve the availability of your heavy vehicles and equipment, reduce costs, and maximize customer satisfaction. Thanks to tools like the MIR-RT dashboard, monitoring these indicators becomes possible, allowing you to concentrate on the essential: running your fleet or your repair shop efficiently.
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