What is Time-to-Maintenance?
Time-to-maintenance refers to a given period between a work order or maintenance need being identified and when the maintenance activities begin. Generally, a shorter time-to-maintenance is preferred. A shorter time-to-maintenance duration implies that your maintenance team is responding quickly to unexpected breakdowns or scheduled maintenance.
Time-to-maintenance is often used as one of a facility’s key maintenance KPIs. Tracking this KPI can help managers identify patterns across quick maintenance jobs. From there, these insights can be used to develop strategies that ensure maintenance activities take less time.
Additionally, faster time-to-maintenance usually means less operational downtime. If maintenance professionals respond faster, planned or unplanned downtime doesn’t last as long.
How is Time to Maintenance Calculated?
Time-to-maintenance is calculated by measuring the total time spent between the identification of a maintenance need and required maintenance work.
The calculation involves:
- Logging the time when a maintenance requirement is identified, which could be through a scheduled inspection, a predictive maintenance alert, or the report.
- Recording the time when a maintenance technician starts working on the issue.
- Calculating the difference between these two timestamps.
For example, if a machine issue is reported at 10:00 AM and work begins at 12:00 PM on the same day, the time-to-maintenance would be two hours.
How is Time-to-Maintenance Used?
Tracking your average time-to-maintenance has many benefits. You can cut costs on labor hours, streamline your maintenance schedules, and expedite repair processes to minimize downtime, as just a few examples.
Here are some common ways that tracking this KPI helps managers make more informed decisions.
Maintenance Response Time Analysis
Managers can analyze maintenance team efficiency by measuring the time-to-maintenance metric. This analysis helps determine where response times need improvement and which procedures are most efficient.
Performance Benchmarking
By comparing internal time-to-maintenance data with industry standards, managers can assess the performance of their maintenance teams. This comparison helps managers identify their team’s strengths and weaknesses and set realistic future goals.
Resource Planning
A higher than expected time-to-maintenance metric may reveal other issues. For instance, maintenance teams may be taking longer to respond due to a lack of resources, outdated equipment, or multiple failures occurring at once.
Noticing an unusually high time-to-maintenance may warrant a deeper root cause investigation to reveal these issues and why they are occurring.
Ways to Reduce Time-to-Maintenance
Reducing your mean time-to-maintenance requires strategy. The ideal strategy for your facility may vary based on your business procedures and what preventive maintenance strategy you use, such as time-based maintenance or conditional maintenance.
Implementing a CMMS
A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) helps streamline maintenance requests and scheduling. Accelerating these processes will accelerate response times. That’s because the system will reduce delays that can occur when schedules and requests are processed manually.
Improving Spare Parts Management
Maintaining a well-stocked spare parts inventory ensures that technicians have the assets that they need for their maintenance activities. As a result, time spent sourcing equipment or other assets is greatly reduced.
Training and Staffing
Proper training ensures that maintenance technicians can handle multiple repairs quickly and effectively. Additionally, sufficient staffing levels help prevent bottlenecks that may increase your overall time-to-maintenance.
Preventive Maintenance Schedules
Implementing regular preventive maintenance helps detect potential issues early. Therefore, unplanned maintenance is reduced, which ensures that your technicians can respond to requests faster. Furthermore, proactive scheduled maintenance can simply help you lower overall costs.
Predictive Maintenance
IoT sensors can be used to predict when equipment needs maintenance. This approach helps organizations schedule maintenance before failures cause operational downtime.
Streamlining Workflows
Simplifying workflows removes administrative obstacles and makes it easier for technicians to initiate repairs. Without bureaucratic delays, technicians can start working sooner.
Common Challenges With Keeping Time-to-Maintenance Low
Despite your best efforts, several factors may still interfere with your time-to-maintenance. However, there are some strategies that you can implement to help mitigate such potential challenges.
Unplanned Equipment Failures
While preventative maintenance helps you avoid this risk, external factors, such as weather, can cause equipment to fail unexpectedly. So, create an emergency response plan to mobilize teams quickly when unplanned failures occur. This plan is beneficial as it will help keep your time-to-maintenance low in the face of these incidents.
Inconsistent Preventive Maintenance Schedule
If your staff doesn’t consistently follow preventive maintenance schedules, it can lead to more frequent unplanned repairs. Consider assigning maintenance personnel to specific equipment for accountability and consistency.
Lack of Communication
Poor communication between departments can delay response times if maintenance teams are not promptly informed of issues. Develop clear communication protocols between departments that emphasize promptly requesting maintenance tasks when needed.
Aging Assets
Inevitably, equipment performance will deteriorate over time. As equipment ages, it will require more maintenance and may require a longer repair time per breakdown. Conduct regular assessments of older equipment to identify end-of-life signs. It’s also a good practice to plan phased replacements and regularly scheduled upgrades.
Overburdened Staff
Maintenance teams that are understaffed or overworked may struggle to keep up with demands. If your facility is understaffed, prioritize maintenance tasks to focus on the most critical issues first. Try automating maintenance where possible to free your staff to work on higher-priority tasks.