Are your KPI’s toxic?

Initially, this article was going to be about clients wanting terrible KPI’s, instead I’m going to talk about how KPI’s can create a toxic system of work.

For context, I was consulting on a dashboard for high-level stakeholders who wanted to see how much bang for their buck they were getting from their aircraft maintenance contractors. The singular metric they were interested in was what percentage of planned maintenance had been carried out during a deep maintenance package.

So what’s the problem with this? It focuses the maintenance team on prioritizing quick, simple jobs rather than the lengthy ones. Let’s say the contractors had 100 tasks to do during a maintenance period and completed 98 of them. Sweet, that’s 98% of all the work done, right? Wrong. What if the 98 tasks they carried out we’re repainting rivets, replacing first aid kits, and changing batteries in LRU’s, and the two tasks they didn’t bother with were replacing an engine and transmission system?

This tells us that just measuring the percentage of tasks completed doesn’t give the stakeholders what value for money they’re getting. This metric is unfortunately what my client was adamant about having. I can see a lot of you reading this facepalming, which was my immediate reaction (fortunately I carried this initial consultation over the phone).

Okay, so how is this toxic?

This metric encourages planned maintenance to be carried out as quickly as possible. Sounds great, right? Wrong.

During a deep maintenance package the aircraft is stripped down to it’s bare hull, and then maintenance carried out on all the usually hidden components. Often during this maintenance additional faults are discovered, and a system of work focused solely on rewarding completion of planned maintenance leaves a no room for carrying out additional corrective maintenance that may be discovered. This encourages unsafe practices and deferral of work.

Unsafe practices can be anything from maintainers cutting corners to get as much maintenance done as possible in a short time, to supervisors not having sufficient time to assess any faults that have been discovered. But what’s the big deal about deferring work to a later date? Well, any aircraft technician could tell you a large amount of labour hours are spent removing panels and equipment followed by their replacement. This means carrying out the corrective maintenance at a later date incurs additional labor costs, while rectifying faults as you go give the client better value for money, and reduce safety implications of operating an aircraft with a known fault.

So what KPI’s can we use to create a positive system of work?

Unfortunately, in any environment where a single visual on a dashboard is used to assess someone’s performance, there is going to be a massive disconnect between the executive looking at it and what the maintainers are actually doing. But as dashboards are here to stay, it is important to show the labour hours of all work by maintainers, as the labour hours spent carrying out corrective maintenance when the aircraft is already stripped down can be up to 70% less than if they were deferred and carried out at a later date. This metric in particular shows excellent value for money and identifies diligence in the workforce.

Most important of all is an environment that rewards saving the client time and increases safety.

So what’s the takeaway from this?

What I’ve taken from this experience is that executives aren’t engineers, clients don’t always know what they want, and that KPI’s aren’t a replacement for investing time in learning how your workforce operates.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have encountered similar situations and what you did about them!