Some notes on the comma CMMS dashboard charts

Published 2020-03-16 by Rui J Alves (a 4.5 minute read) | Back to the main page

The charts on the dashboard of comma CMMS are designed to give you a glimpse of the quality of your maintenance efforts and therefore it is useful to know what type of curve you should be aiming for. Remember that you can set the view depth of your dashboard charts by selecting the "Own", "Department" or "Organization" options which allow you to see your own performance or the performance of your team (the default view that opens every time you open your dashboard can be set per user and can be done on the user profile area).

From left to right, we start with the distribution of currently open work orders (which means all work orders that are currently not set as closed nor complete) organized by priority. The two main metrics to look at here are:

The total amount of orders (the sum of the height of all bars). This depends on your organization and needs to be as low as possible.

The priority distribution that needs to be weighted towards the lower priority orders. Ideally all open work orders would be P4 or P5 which means that you have no breakdowns and no unplanned jobs.

The first chart should always look like the following:

If it doesn't look like this, you may have set the priorities incorrectly (P1 = high priority to P5 = lowest priority) or you may have an issue with your maintenance procedures.

The second chart shows all your open work orders by type. Type can be any of the following:

• Corrective
• Preventive
• Predictive
• Breakdown
• Other

You should aim for no breakdowns and for no corrective orders as the elimination of those is the purpose of most maintenance strategies. You should classify orders as "Other" in as few cases as possible and then you should be doing mostly preventive and hopefully predictive actions. The second chart should look something like this:

The third chart shows open (considers complete orders in this case) work orders by status for which the options are:

• AS - Assigned
• IN - In progress
• PA - Paused
• WA - Wait for material
• CO - Complete

Here you should have a good balance between assigned orders (orders that have been put on the maintenance queue), orders that are currently being worked on (in progress) and completed work orders. If you balance these out you can get a rough estimate (rough because the number of work orders says nothing about the job complexity and job duration) that potentially you and/ or your team are processing and completing jobs at the same rate they are coming in (in contrast with a curve that shows many assigned jobs and comparatively little complete jobs, indicating the team is overwhelmed at least on the current period). With this in mind this third chart should look something like this:

You should aim for no work orders stopped because they are waiting for material. When in excess that might indicate poor spare part management and perhaps the minimum quantities to purchase should be reassessed. Work orders that are paused usually have been looked at but were put on a waiting list perhaps due to lack of resources, due to lack of operational conditions to perform the task or queued to be done on a larger machine overhaul - all that will depend on your actual case.

The fourth and last chart shows the balance between planned work orders (work orders that were issued automatically from a maintenance plan) and unplanned work orders (work orders that were created manually after an inspection or from a failure report issued by operations). Usually the aim here is to ensure that most work orders are planned (blue color) rather than unplanned (red color).

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for maintenance metrics but the insights that the comma CMMS dashboard charts can provide are almost common sense and thus apply to most maintenance organizations. If possible, system users (mainly technicians and managers) should be trained to identify the expected graph shapes and values (like total open work order numbers) so that they can quickly determine whenever their maintenance actions start to develop issues. Additionally, we have found that these metrics are a good discussion point for the maintenance weekly meeting as it helps everyone involved to visually analyze and comment on performance data while getting used to what are average numbers and variations to those numbers.

We hope this article was useful to you. Here at comma CMMS we strive to provide useful tools to help you perform your maintenance work better!