A Single, Simple Error Nearly Destroyed All Trust in My Maintenance KPI Reports

This is the story of a turning point.

It's the story of how building a KPI reporting system that's complicated, uncontrolled and undocumented can lead to stress, wasted work and most of all the destruction of all you hard won trust in any maintenance KPI figures that you send out in the Monday morning report!

The thing is, very few maintenance teams start off thinking "Let's build a complicated, uncontrolled and labour-intensive system for creating our weekly KPI report". It normally starts innocently enough with a simple request. Perhaps a new maintenance manager has joined the team or an operations manager started to take an interest in what their backlog work orders are because they want a better understanding of where their risk are.

So you run a report in the CMMS, export it to Excel and send it off.

Then the fun starts...

"Can you create a tab for each department" - So you start copy each departments work order into seperat tabs to make it easy for them to fine their work"

"Can we add some visuals?" - so you start to build visuals in the Excel spreadsheet, like bar charts, pie charts, and line chart trends

"Can we trend this?" - so you start taking a copy of all the work orders each week

"Can we add in some production outage data for breakdown work orders?" - so the spreadsheet grows, and you add VLOOKUPs to find the production loss data related to breakdown work orders.

And so it continues.

What was as simple "Export to Excel" request has morphed into a reporting system, no planning, no documentation, multiple exports, multiple people feeding data, lots of copy and pasting, no version controll and on and on...

There is a way out.

Check out this video explaining my story and a tool I recommend for helping you get you maintenance reporting under control using Power BI.

Here's the link again "One Simple Error Nearly Broke Trust in My Maintenance KPI Reports"