Charts, Dashboards, and KPI's Are Everywhere

I recently read a great article by Travis Richardson who is a reliability and lubrication expert, specializing in machinery lubrication, oil analysis, and asset reliability. He’s also recognized for his leadership in promoting proactive maintenance strategies that extend equipment life and reduce downtime. Proper information on maintenance issues in your CMMS is so vital that I just wanted to post a blog on this issue that we all have dealt with in one form or another.

If you attend maintenance or reliability conferences, you’ve seen how much attention metrics get. Charts, dashboards, KPIs everywhere. Sometimes it feels like once the graph is posted, reliability is magically improved. But metrics are just measurements. And a measurement is only as good as what’s feeding it.

Whenever someone starts listing their maintenance KPIs, my first question is always: What’s behind those numbers? If you’re not tracking the right inputs, or all the necessary ones, the metrics don’t really tell you much.

This really shows up in work management inside the CMMS. Are you capturing everything that actually happens on a job? What about skipped tasks? And more importantly, are the numbers actually helping you improve the program or are you just admiring a clean dashboard?

Take PM completion, for example. It’s one of the most common metrics used to “prove” performance. Leadership wants to know the work is getting done. Fair enough.

But here’s what I’ve seen on plant floors. I’ll review a PM with a technician, and they’ll point out several things they always do that aren’t written down anywhere. So, I ask, “Does everyone else do those extra steps? And is that time built into the job?” Usually, the answer is no. Now your completion metric is already misleading.

Then there’s the skipped task issue. Maybe a machine is running when an oil change is scheduled. Or the equipment is down but the motor bearings still need grease. A lot of times, that work order still gets marked “complete.” So, what happens?

·         The asset didn’t get what it needed.

·         The route looks shorter than it really is.

·         The dashboard shows a nice green checkmark.

Meanwhile, critical work was missed.

Most CMMS systems don’t manage skipped tasks very well, so those blind spots quietly become part of your metrics. And if all you’re checking is whether tasks were completed on time, you’re missing most of the story.

I’ve heard plenty of managers say their program is “good” or “bad” just by looking at the dashboard. But “perfect” compliance can still hide serious problems. On the flip side, poor compliance doesn’t automatically mean the team is lazy or understaffed. Sometimes the real issue is task frequency.

I’ve reviewed tons of PMs that show up weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly with the same instruction: “Grease all bearings.” Do they really need that frequency? Sometimes, yes. But many times, better lubricant selection or proper volume could stretch that interval significantly. When techs are stuck repeating low-value work, that’s time they’re not spending on stuff that actually prevents failures.

Time capture is another big one. If labor hours are vague, defaulted, or not logged at all, your data gets even shakier. Labor is usually your biggest maintenance cost. If you’re not capturing it accurately, you can’t justify staffing, spot bottlenecks, or make smart decisions about overtime or contractors. Again, the dashboard may look fine. Reality might not be.

Work management metrics shouldn’t just fill out a monthly report. They should create a feedback loop. If a PM route consistently shows poor compliance, that’s a signal to dig deeper. Are the assets hard to access? Is coordination with operations breaking down? Are shutdown windows unrealistic? Too often, the metric gets noted and everyone moves on.

One of the biggest disconnects I see is between PM performance and reactive work. If PM compliance looks great but reactive work keeps climbing, something’s wrong. Either the PM tasks aren’t effective, they aren’t being done correctly, or something important is missing.

If you don’t tie PM metrics to downtime and asset performance, you risk optimizing the wrong thing. You end up getting good at closing work orders instead of improving reliability.

At the end of the day, a CMMS only reflects the quality of the data going into it.

Dashboards are helpful, but they’re not a substitute for thinking. The real value comes from understanding what the numbers actually represent, what they leave out, and how they line up with what’s really happening on the plant floor.

When you look at metrics that way, they stop being vanity numbers and start becoming tools for real improvement. Next time I will show how this is a money maker for the company and a tool for the maintenance tech.