9 Metrics to Track in Restaurant Maintenance
Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
Mean Time To Repair, known as MTTR, is one of the foundational metrics for facilities management professionals.
Your MTTR reflects how quickly you are able to create, dispatch, and close work orders, on average. It is a measure of how effective your entire corrective maintenance process is, from issue identification to solution. Your MTTR indicates when there is a problem in your process, although it might not identify exactly where an improvement is needed.
MTTRs are a common key performance indicator (KPI) within companies, or MTTR timelines might be baked into preferred vendor contracts. Depending on your organization, your exact MTTR may range from hours to days to even weeks for certain items. Goals may differ across companies, but comparing your MTTR to historical benchmarks and industry benchmarks will give you an idea of how you are doing.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
Your equipment uptime (and in contrast, downtime) is a helpful metric to monitor. With full equipment information assigned, you can compare performance across different categories, such as type of equipment, location, or equipment manufacturer.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) reflects the average time between issues, dividing an asset’s total uptime by the number of failures. A high or worsening MTBF can indicate where problematic assets are developing, and where you may need to review preventive maintenance (PM) or consider repair vs replace decisions.
“Turn Time” (Work Order Dispatch Time)
In the restaurant industry, you “turn tables” to generate more revenue. In facilities management, how long does it take you to “turn” work orders? For many restaurant companies, one of the biggest efficiencies that can be gained in maintenance is better, faster dispatches.
A work order goes through multiple stages in between initial submission and the eventual dispatch of a technician for a repair. For instance, after a WO was submitted, how long did it take for a vendor to put in a bid or proposal? Then, how long did it wait for approval? Was there a step that required waiting for or ordering spare parts?
Using a CMMS, you can implement more detailed work order statuses to help you see how the work order progresses. These interim steps are often areas for improvement that would be obscured by a vague “in progress” status.
First Time Fix Rate
Your team spends time and resources to dispatch technicians to fix facilities issues — you want to know if this effort is well-spent. By tracking your first-time fix rate, the frequency at which a work order is solved the first time and doesn’t require a second dispatch, you have an idea of the effectiveness of your vendors or internal teams.
If your first time fix rate is low, examine what happens when technicians or contractors actually visit your restaurants. Equipment that requires multiple dispatches is a learning opportunity. Depending on what you find, you can identify areas for improvement in how information is compiled in work order submissions, or invest in technician training or spare parts availability.
Nuisance Work Orders
“Nuisance” work orders are work orders where support is requested but a technician wasn’t actually needed. These might be equipment issues where the restaurant location team reported the issue incorrectly, missed an obvious solution to their problem, or didn’t follow best practices before placing the work order.
Restaurant crews are typically “on location” identifying your issues for you. If you can understand their effectiveness in generating work orders, you can determine if additional training would improve overall facilities maintenance. Tagging these nuisance WOs and quantifying their impact can help you get to the root of the problem and minimize unnecessary truck rolls.
Preventive Maintenance Completion Rate
Your Preventive Maintenance (PM) work orders are essential to long-term equipment health, and yet it is easy to de-prioritize PMs during busy seasons. Keep track of any delayed PMs by tracking the percentage of scheduled preventive maintenance tasks that are completed as assigned, as well as the percentage of rescheduled PMs on a rolling basis. You can identify where there are hiccups in PM completion, before issues start to arise at your locations.
Work Order Backlog
Monitoring the size of your work order backlog is a helpful metric for restaurant facilities managers, especially if the budget is squeezed. Your work order backlog might be represented in numbers of WOs, or it can be calculated by dividing total labor hours for work orders by the total estimated available labor hours.
A large WO backlog indicates a shift to reactive maintenance instead of proactive facilities management, and it can lead to higher equipment downtime. By keeping an eye on this metric over time, you are monitoring the big picture of your facilities management strategy.
Repair vs Replace Spend
For every piece of equipment, there may be a point in the lifecycle where it makes more sense to replace than repair the asset again. This is a critical metric for optimizing your maintenance spend.
To calculate this tipping point, your central maintenance platform needs to accurately track everything from repair invoices to parts usage and unexpected downtime costs. While this tracking requires effort to set up, budget information provides a clear line of sight into your long-term facilities strategy.
Vendor or Location-Specific Metrics
Especially if you manage multiple locations, regions, or vendors and contractors, it can be helpful to slice and dice your metrics to compare performance between teams. For example, you can compare vendors on key metrics such as first-time fix rate, indicating their general effectiveness for repairs.
Reviewing MTTR across both locations and vendors can help you spot outliers that can indicate potential training or geographic issues.
And depending on your company’s administrative setup, you might review turn time, invoice approvals, and more based on location or manager, to spot if certain teams are less effective on the backoffice admin than others.
