One of the main reasons to track maintenance metrics is to measure the performance of your maintenance team. To achieve maintenance excellence, you must have an efficient staff that completes jobs correctly and on time.

The majority of property management companies employ two types of maintenance personnel: in-house maintenance technicians and external third-party vendors. Maintenance technicians are typically salaried employees who only complete jobs for your properties. A third-party vendor or contractor is someone that you hire on a per-job basis based on their speciality. Property management companies can be made up of both internal maintenance technicians and third-party vendors, and there are benefits to both maintenance structures.

Whether you are utilizing third-party vendors or an internal team, ensuring their efficiency is crucial to the success of your property management company. Tracking key metrics related to maintenance performance is the best way to identify any problem areas in your maintenance process or opportunities to optimize your team.

Before you can begin tracking metrics related to maintenance performance, you have to understand scheduling efficiency and staffing efficiency at a deeper level.

For more insights on scheduling efficiency, staffing efficiency, and other aspects of the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence, subscribe to the Maintenance Minute.

Scheduling Efficiency Versus Staffing Efficiency:

Your scheduling efficiency refers to the speed at which you can complete a task. When a work order is received, how promptly can your team schedule it with an appropriate vendor or internal technician, and arrange a time for the repair to be completed with the resident? On the other hand, staffing efficiency determines if you have the right-sized team to handle the number of work orders you receive on time.

Imagine arriving at an auto shop to get an oil change for your car. If there are 30 technicians working on 15-minute oil changes simultaneously, they may be very efficient, but we understand that may not be a profitable business model. So even though they can get the job done quickly, they don’t have the right amount of people working for the demand of the job. That is the critical difference between scheduling and staffing efficiency. Scheduling efficiency refers to how fast you can get a job done. While staffing efficiency is determining how many team members you need to get the job done promptly.

Now that you have a better understanding of what maintenance performance means, we will go over what metrics you should track to determine the performance of your maintenance team.

Technician Utilization Rate:

Technician utilization rate is a metric used to measure the productivity and efficiency of your internal maintenance technicians. The technician utilization rate represents the amount of time a technician spends on billable work compared to their total available working hours. This helps you measure your technicians’ effectiveness and how much of their day is spent on tasks that directly contribute to your bottom line. For example, most salaried employees work 40 hours a week. If your maintenance technician spends 30 hours on billable tasks, you can calculate their utilization rate as follows.

Utilization Rate = (Billable or Productive Hours / Total Available Hours) x 100

(30/40) X 100 = 75%

Jobs Per Day:

Jobs per day are simple; it measures how many appointments a maintenance technician can complete in one day. However, to determine if there is a problem with your staffing efficiency, you have to track both jobs per day and your utilization rate. If you don’t follow both of these metrics, you will have significant blind spots in your process and struggle to find how to improve. For example, if you have a technician who is only taking on quick, easy jobs but you aren’t sure how they’re spending the majority of their day, time may be wasted even though their jobs per day are healthy.

On the other hand, if it takes a maintenance technician four hours to complete a repair, that should only take two; their technician utilization rate may be reasonable, but in reality, they aren’t working efficiently. Tracking these two metrics together will help you catch inefficiencies with your internal maintenance team.

Speed of Repair:

Lastly, if you want to track your scheduling and staffing efficiency, you should closely monitor your repair speed. Speed of repair measures how long a work order takes to complete from the time a resident submits it. At Property Meld, we prefer to divide the speed of the repair process into various segments.. This lets you visualize which part of the maintenance process takes the longest. Maybe your team struggles with assigning the right maintenance person or vendor to a task promptly. Or it might take a while to schedule a time with the resident for the repair to be completed. This is why we divide the speed of repair into rate to assign, speed to schedule, and speed to invoice.

Schedule a demo with our team to see how you can improve your metrics and your maintenance process.