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 your 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, sole sucking 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 risks 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 copying each department's work orders into separate tabs to make it easy for them to find 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 a simple "Export to Excel" request has morphed into a reporting system—no planning, no documentation, multiple exports, multiple people feeding data, lots of copying and pasting, no version control, 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 your maintenance reporting under control using Power BI.

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