The Bottom Line on Key Performance Indicators

1/11/2024

Are you selling key performance indicators (KPI) short? 

When used effectively, KPIs offer maintenance and engineering managers an appealing range of benefits. They can improve department communication by demonstrating staff performance. They can help technicians focus on achieving goals. They can even help managers identify staff training needs. 

Too often, though, managers overlook the most beneficial use for KPIs: improving the bottom line. 

This critical point has stuck with me since a presentation by Michael Theriault, principal and senior consultant with FM Insight Consulting, at World Workplace 2023 in Denver. KPIs can do so much more than managers might realize, Theriault says. Specifically, they help managers talk effectively to executives who focus on financial results. 

“Why talk KPIs to executives?” Theriault asks. “If your department is understaffed or underfunded, KPIs can indicate future issues. They can help build the case for more staff and more funding.” 

The key is “key.” 

Performance indicators — without the key — measure activities and processes, Theriault says. They help managers generate performance-related guidance designed to improve, change or modify technician activities. They track such data points as employee satisfaction, response times and preventive maintenance backlog and completion. 

KPIs are next level. They focus on business results related to an organization's core business. They put facilities maintenance and repair data in terms that the C-suite can understand related to financial results. 

KPIs represent an organization’s most important outcomes. By centering the department’s efforts on those outcomes, managers will be better able to tell the C-suite about the department’s importance to the organization and to the bottom line. 

Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.