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, up-to-date 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.
1. 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.
2. 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 the business as a whole. But most, as with a lot of businesses, don't necessarily know which jobs, contracts or clients are performing best and worst. In our experience, many businesses could be immediately more profitable by identifying and improving (or ceasing) loss-making activities. However, this is frequently 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: compare margins by client, job type, contract or region and apply the Pareto principle: 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.
3. Service level compliance rate
What it tells you: the percentage of jobs completed within target service levels (whether internal or agreed with the client), for example response time and 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 risk losing work.
How to use it: don't wait for someone to complain about your service; by that point it might be too late. Service levels have often become very poor by the time a client actually speaks up. Measure your service levels and know where the problems are, then 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.
4. Reactive vs planned maintenance ratio
What it tells you: simply, the proportion of jobs and related cost in each category. If your service for clients includes both planned and reactive maintenance, measuring this gives 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 to deliver effectively.
How to use it: if you are also responsible for collaborating on planned maintenance with your client, knowing the jobs and areas driving high reactive cost lets you give them the data to demonstrate the need to increase spend on problem areas. That should give you more visibility of work and revenue, and fewer lumpy strains on resource. Most likely, shifting towards a higher proportion of planned maintenance will drive better net margins, as the overhead needed to manage a high proportion of reactive work reduces.
5. 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 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, for example jobs spread too far apart or across too many technicians. You might find inefficiencies in skill sets: your most utilised technicians may be multi-skilled, which lets their jobs be scheduled or allocated more efficiently than others'. This should inform training and recruitment. You'll be surprised at the patterns you can spot when you have this data readily available.
6. Asset utilisation
What it tells you: the amount of time your non-people assets (for example 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 simply depreciation. Assets that cost you money without being used are another way to lose 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 have only used 25 a day on average for the last six months, 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.
7. 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, 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 costs increase. Knowing where your costs are changing, and having a process to try to pass this on (we know it's not always possible), gives you a fighting chance of 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 the same product from several suppliers, make sure you can compare their cost over a sensible period.
8. Jobs completed per day (or per technician)
What it tells you: a basic productivity measure: how much work your team is delivering. Consider combining it with jobs completed against jobs planned, as a percentage. That will also show you whether your teams are as productive as you expect them to be.
Why it matters: your pricing is probably based on assumptions, such as the number of jobs a technician can complete in a day. If you're not measuring the actual number, your assumptions could be wrong without you knowing. You may find that some types of job take longer than others, or that some technicians or 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 complete as many jobs in a day on average as you thought, change your pricing to address this (if possible). If you complete fewer because of inefficiencies such as job scheduling or allocation, look to make improvements, for example software or AI tools that optimise job allocation by clustering locations. You may need to introduce scorecards and incentives for managers and technicians to drive 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, because no one wants to be at the bottom of a league table. Combine it with first-time fix rate to create an all-round scorecard for team performance.
9. Open job age
What it tells you: how long uncompleted jobs have been open.
Why it matters: incomplete jobs which have been open for a long time flag that there is a problem somewhere. Job delays create backlogs, can lead to missed deadlines and SLAs, and can damage client trust if they are repeated.
How to use it: use this alongside service level compliance rate to measure how well you are delivering your service to clients. Make sure you can filter by client, project, team and job type to get 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 need materials that are hard to get hold of, and then you know what to address. Certain clients might have delays on their jobs because they provide incomplete information and you have to chase them to get what you need. There can be a range of reasons why you're not hitting targets; having the data connects the problem to its root cause and potential solutions.
10. Client satisfaction score
What it 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, a client will frequently leave it quite a while before 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 encourage honesty.
How to use it: we'd suggest a simple survey after every job, or group of jobs, whichever is most manageable. Email software can automatically send the client an email with three options to click: red (sad face), amber (satisfied face) and green (happy face). This is all you really need. Collate the data and look at the percentage score. Once again, make sure you can filter by the right categories, such as client, project and job type. That way you can spot patterns and dig deeper to identify issues, using all the other metrics above, and learn what you need to do to improve. You can also let clients add comments to their responses. These can give you insight into problems you might not otherwise spot, such as technician behaviour on site or poor communication. On the flip side, comments on positive responses 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 probably be creating a full-time job for someone to chase down data and manage a wide array of complex spreadsheets.
Leading FM businesses use 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 probably contain all the data you need to measure KPIs that could transform your business performance.
Unfortunately, they usually don't connect well with each other, and many individual systems have weak built-in reporting. This frequently means manually extracting data into CSV files and combining it in a spreadsheet to get useful information. It is time-consuming and difficult, with inherent issues around accuracy, and it has 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 around day-to-day priorities.
That's where Vizora Data Forge can help.
Vizora for facilities management
Vizora Data Forge joins the data from every system you run into one certified set of numbers, and Vizora Reports turns it into visual performance dashboards that update automatically.
- Your top KPIs, always up to date
- Vizora AI Alerts that email the right person when a figure crosses a threshold
- No more spreadsheets or manual reporting
- Run and supported by our team, with no in-house resource required
Want to see these KPIs in action?
Book a free reporting health check and we'll look at:
- What your dashboard could look like
- How we'd connect your current systems
- How you could save hours every week
- How you can drive margin and revenue with better data