Top KPIs Every Facilities Management Business Should Be Tracking
Here, we break down the top 10 KPIs every FM business should track, why they matter and how to make them part of your daily reporting.
Why KPIs matter in facilities management
Like many businesses, facilities management is a delicate balancing act – juggling multiple clients, sites, assets, subcontractors and a mobile workforce. You need eyes and ears everywhere, which of course, isn’t possible…
To stay on top of it all, leading FM businesses rely on clear, real-time performance indicators to guide decisions.
Here, we break down the top 10 KPIs every FM business should track, why they matter and how to make them part of your daily reporting.
- First-time fix rate (FTFR)
What it tells you:
The percentage of jobs completed successfully on the first visit.
Why it matters:
A low FTFR increases costs, reduces technician productivity (by reducing their capacity to generate revenue) and frustrates clients.
How to use it:
Track by technician, site, contract and/or asset type to identify common issues or patterns which can be addressed with additional training or better processes. Check to see if any issues are due to out of scope work or changed scopes which can be recovered under your contract. Set appropriate targets for FTFR and create automated alerts for when they are not met. Capture reasons in a way that you can report on them later to spot trends.
- Job and Contract Gross Margin
What it tells you:
The profitability of individual jobs or contracts after direct costs (people, vans, equipment and materials).
Why it matters:
Many FM businesses are busy, and hopefully profitable across all business. But most, as with a lot of businesses, don’t necessarily know which jobs, contracts or clients are performing the best and worst. In our experience, many businesses could be immediately more profitable by identifying and improving (or ceasing) loss-making activities. However, frequently this is hampered by not having the data to know the specific things that are making or losing money, whether it be jobs, contracts or clients.
How to use it:
Use the data to compare margins by client, job type, contract or region and apply the pareto principle – that 80% of your outputs come from 20% of your inputs. If you find that one part of your business is underperforming compared to others, act on it. You may be able to increase price, improve scope management or simply reallocate resources to more profitable activity. Worst case, just stop doing it – you might actually be better off.
- Service level compliance rate
What it tells you:
The percentage of jobs completed within target service levels (whether internal or agreed with the client), e.g. response time, fix time.
Why it matters:
Clients expect service levels to be met or exceeded; regardless of whether they are in a contract. If you’re not performing, you can damage relationships and / or risk losing work.
How to use it:
Don’t wait for someone to complain about your service, by this point it might be too late – often service levels have become very poor by the time a client actually speaks up. Measure your service levels and know where the problems are – go to clients before they come to you. This level of ownership deepens relationships and prevents “empty restaurant syndrome”, where customers don’t complain, they just don’t come back.
- Reactive vs Planned Maintenance ratio
What it tells you:
Simple, the proportion of jobs and related cost for each category. If your service for clients includes both planned and reactive maintenance, then measuring this data will give you a clear insight into how your work is divided.
Why it matters:
This will vary depending on how you contract with clients. Typically, reactive maintenance is more difficult to manage and resource and incurs more cost. It might be more profitable than planned maintenance, depending on your pricing structure. However, it will no doubt require more overhead cost to deliver effectively.
How to use it:
If you are also responsible for collaborating on planned maintenance with your client, knowing the jobs / areas which are driving high reactive cost should allow you to provide them with data to demonstrate the need to increase spend on problem areas. This should deliver you with more visibility of work and revenue, and less lumpy strains on resource. Most likely, shifting towards a higher percentage of planned to reactive maintenance should drive better net margins as the need for overheads to manage a high proportion of reactive maintenance reduces.
- Technician utilisation
What it tells you:
The percentage of available technician time spent on productive, billable work.
Why it matters:
This one is probably obvious, low utilisation means a low return on investment on your most expensive resource: people.
How to use it:
Benchmark performance across teams or individuals. Where there are differences, look for the reasons why. It could be travel time, job scheduling or job allocation. You may have inefficiencies in your planning processes, e.g. jobs spread too far apart, or across too many technicians. You might find that you have inefficiencies in skillset – for example, you might find your highest utilised technicians are multi-skilled, allowing them to have jobs scheduled or allocated more efficiently than others. This should inform training and / or recruitment. You’ll be surprised the patterns you can spot when you have this data readily available.
- Asset utilisation
What it tells you:
The amount of time your non-people assets (e.g. vans and other equipment) spend actually being used.
Why it matters:
If you own assets which are used for doing work, they probably have a cost for each day you own them, whether that is a lease payment or in just depreciation in value. Not knowing that you have assets costing you money, but not being used is another way you can be losing margin.
How to use it:
Make sure you don’t have surplus equipment or vehicles which are costing money but not being used. If you do, come up with a plan to manage and reduce this. For example, if you own 30 vans, but on average you’ve only used 25 per day for last 6 months then you don’t need 30. You may need a surplus for peak days, but that could be managed more cost effectively through short term rentals.
- Cost per job
What it tells you:
Total operational cost per completed job, including labour, materials and travel.
Why it matters:
If the figure is rising, then your margins are shrinking. Understanding your cost (and how it is changing) is essential for pricing, resource planning and profitability.
How to use it:
When your costs change, you should have a plan for how to adjust your pricing to match. For example, if you have annual pay reviews for your people, do you also have annual price increases for clients? If not, you are absorbing that cost. Likewise, if you have supplier contracts which are subject to price fluctuations, have you got a way to pass those cost increases on? Although it’s common to work on a fixed price basis in FM, it’s often possible to seek annual inflationary price increases in contracts, or even provisions which trigger a price review if your supply cost increases. Knowing where your costs are changing and having a process to try and pass this on (we know it’s not always possible) gives you a fighting chance at maintaining margin with a changing cost base.
At worst, you might just discover that you’re not buying well and can secure better prices from suppliers. If you buy from multiple suppliers for the same product, ensure you can compare their cost over a sensible period.
- Jobs completed per day (or per technician)
What it tells you:
A basic productivity measure – how much work your team is delivering. Consider combining this with jobs completed v jobs planned as a percentage. This will then also show you if your teams are being as productive as you expect them to be.
Why it is important:
It’s likely your pricing is based on some assumptions, such as the number of jobs a technician can complete in a single day. If you’re not measuring the actual number, then your assumptions could be wrong and you may not know. You may find that some types of job are taking longer than others, or you may find that some technicians are more productive than others, or that some teams are more productive than others.
How to use it:
As with all of the other metrics above, spot the patterns and then consider ways to improve them. If you can’t actually complete as many jobs in a day on average as you thought, change your pricing address this (if possible). If you don’t complete any many because of inefficiencies, such as job scheduling or allocation, then look to make improvements (such as implementing software or AI solutions that will optimise job allocation for you to maximise productivity by clustering geographic locations). It may be that you need to introduce scorecards and incentives for managers and technicians to drive improvement in productivity. Competitive tension and variable reward can lead to improved performance. Make these numbers visible to your engineers and teams – that alone might create an improvement, no one wants to be at the bottom of a league table. Combine it with % First Time Fix to create all-around scorecard for team performance.
- Open job age
What it tells you:
How long uncompleted jobs have been open.
Why it is important:
Incomplete jobs which have been open for a long time flag there is a problem somewhere. Job delays create backlogs, can lead to missed deadlines / SLAs and can damage client trust if they are repeated.
How to use it:
Use this alongside service level compliance rate to give yourself a measure of how well you are delivering your service to clients. Ensure you can filter by client, project, team and job type to give yourself the best picture of what is going well and what needs improving. Once again, look for patterns – certain job types might be taking longer because they require certain materials and there are problems getting hold of them, you then know what you need to address. Certain clients might have delays on their jobs because they are providing incomplete information, and you are having to chase them to get what you need to get the job done. There can be a range of reasons why you’re not hitting targets – having the data connects the problem with the ability to identify the root source and potential solutions.
- Client satisfaction score
What is tells you:
Quite self-explanatory – how happy your clients are with your service.
Why it matters:
Equally obvious: no clients = no business. However, as we’ve said before, in many circumstances a client will frequently leave it quite a while before proactively telling you they are unhappy, by which time it can be a difficult or impossible journey back. Head this off by asking them before they come to you and aim to encourage honesty.
How to use it:
We’d suggest using a simple survey approach after every job, or group of jobs – whichever is most manageable. You can get email software which automatically sends the client an email with 3 options to click on – red (sad face), amber (satisfied face), green (happy face). This is all you really need. Collate the data and see the percentage score. Once again, ensure you can filter by the right categories, such as client, project, job type etc. That way, you can spot patterns and dig deeper to identify issues (using all the other metrics above). You can then learn what you need to do to improve. You can also add the option to provide comments along with the responses. This can give you insight into problems you may not be otherwise able to spot, e.g. technician behaviour on site, or poor communication. On the flipside, for positive responses, comments are a quick and easy way to build a bank of testimonials you can use in your marketing.
How to track these KPIs without spreadsheet overkill
You could create and update all of these KPIs manually, but you would likely be creating a full time job for someone to chase down data and manage a wide array of complex looking spreadsheets.
Leading FM businesses are using a mix of software to deal with:
- Job management
- Scheduling
- Accounting
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Vehicle tracking
- Compliance
- Data transfer from office to field operatives
These systems likely contain all the data that you need to measure KPIs that could allow you to transform your business performance.
Unfortunately, they usually don’t connect well with each other, and many individual systems suffer from having weak in-built reporting. This frequently means manually extracting data into CSV files and them combining it in a spreadsheet to be able to get useful information. A time-consuming and difficult task, with inherent issues around accuracy. Also one which then needs to be repeated from scratch for every reporting period you want to look at. Many businesses start doing this and it falls by the wayside simply because it is too time consuming to do consistently and effectively around day to day priorities.
That’s where outsourced BI can help.
Vizora: Real time dashboards for Facilities Management
At Vizora, we build automated dashboards that pull in your data from every system and turn it into live, visual performance insights.
- Your top KPIs, always up to date
- Alerts when performance drops
- No more spreadsheets or manual reporting
- Built and supported by our team – no in house resource required.
Want to see these KPIs in action?
Book a short call and we’ll show you:
- What your dashboard could look like
- How we’d integrate your current systems
- How you could save hours every week
- How you can drive margin and revenue with better data