.jpeg)
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn or attended a maintenance or reliability conference lately, you’ve probably noticed how much attention metrics get. Everyone talks about them as if posting a chart magically improves reliability. Metrics, at their core, are simply measurements—but a measurement is only as good as the inputs behind it. When someone starts listing their maintenance metrics, my first question is always the same: what’s feeding the numbers? If you’re not tracking the right inputs (or all of the necessary ones) those metrics may not be telling you anything meaningful.
This article focuses on work management metrics inside a CMMS. Are we capturing every relevant part of the job? What happens to skipped or incomplete tasks? And most importantly, are the numbers helping the program, or are we just admiring them on a dashboard?
One of the most common metrics used to “prove” maintenance performance is PM or route completion. Executives and site managers want reassurance that the work is actually being done, and on the surface, it’s a reasonable place to look. The problem shows up when you dig in. I’ve walked plant floors with technicians while reviewing their PMs, and they’ll often point out half a dozen steps they always do that aren’t written down anywhere. My follow-up question is simple: Does everyone else do those same extra steps, and are they reflected in the time allowed for the PM? If the answer is no, then the completion metric is already misleading. Data drives metrics, and incomplete data guarantees distorted results.
Another question that rarely gets asked is what happens to skipped tasks. Imagine a machine is running and an oil change is scheduled (or a piece of equipment is down but the electric motor bearings still need to be greased). Most of the time, those work orders still get marked “complete.” That creates problems. The asset didn’t get the care it needed at the intended interval. The overall route time looks artificially short. And the CMMS reports a shiny green checkmark even though critical work was missed. Since many CMMS platforms don’t have a solid way to log skipped tasks, these blind spots tend to creep into the metrics automatically.
So what should a work management dashboard actually tell you? If you’re only checking that tasks were completed on time, you’re missing most of the story. Plenty of managers will tell me their program is “good” or “bad” based purely on that dashboard view. But as we’ve already established, “perfect” compliance can still hide major issues. At the same time, a non-compliant program doesn’t automatically mean the team is lazy or understaffed. Sometimes the real issue is task frequency. I’ve reviewed countless work orders that pop up weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly with the same instruction: “Grease all bearings.” Do those bearings truly need lubrication that often? Sometimes the answer is yes—but plenty of times, the right lubricant or grease volume could cut that frequency dramatically. When techs spend time repeating unnecessary tasks, they lose time they could spend on genuinely critical work.
Time capture is another overlooked piece of the puzzle. If technicians close work orders with vague or default labor hours (or if they don’t log hours at all) the data becomes even less reliable. Labor is usually the largest maintenance cost, so when hours aren’t captured accurately, it becomes nearly impossible to justify staffing, identify delays, or make smart decisions about overtime and contracting. Again, the dashboard may look fine while the reality on the floor is anything but.
Work management metrics shouldn’t exist just to fill out a monthly report. They should create a feedback loop. If certain PM routes consistently show poor compliance, that’s a signal to ask deeper questions. Are the assets hard to reach? Does the task require coordination with operations that isn’t happening? Are shutdown windows unrealistic? Too often those questions never get asked. The metric is acknowledged… and then everyone moves on until the next report.
Another critical link that is often ignored is how PM performance relates to corrective and reactive work. If your PM completion rate looks great but reactive and corrective work keeps climbing, something isn’t adding up. Either the PM tasks aren’t effective, they aren’t being performed correctly, or important tasks are missing. Without tying PM metrics to downtime and asset performance, organizations risk optimizing the wrong thing: closing work orders instead of improving reliability.
In the end, a CMMS only reflects the quality of the data entered into it. Dashboards can be helpful, but they’re not substitutes for critical thinking. The real value comes from understanding what the numbers on that dashboard represent, what they may omit, and how they align with the actual state of your equipment on the plant floor. When you approach work management metrics with that mindset, they stop being vanity numbers and start becoming practical tools for real improvement.
