Most published facility management KPI lists were written for estates departments with analysts, and a single building that tries to keep twenty measures ends up keeping none of them honestly. The useful set is small, and it follows from what the maintenance is for rather than from what a system can count. Four measures cover it, and each one is answerable from a register and a work order history that are being kept properly anyway.
The four worth keeping
Preventive work completed inside its window, which says whether the plan is real. Reactive work as a share of the total, which says whether the plan is winning. The deferred backlog against replacement value, which says whether the building is getting better or worse. And cost per square foot of maintained area, which is the figure a finance committee compares between years. Everything else is diagnostic rather than a measure.
Why the popular ones mislead a small team
Mean time between failures needs a failure population a single building does not have, so it moves on noise. Work order closure rates measure how quickly things are marked done, which is not the same as done. Response time flatters a team that triages well and punishes one that batches sensibly. None of them is wrong in principle; all of them are noisy at the scale of a few hundred assets and a couple of technicians.
Facility maintenance goals and objectives that survive a bad quarter
Facility maintenance goals and objectives work when they name a direction and a floor rather than a target somebody can hit by gaming the record. Raising preventive completion, holding the backlog flat while renewal spending stays flat, or clearing a named class of deferrals are all defensible. A percentage plucked from a benchmark is not, because the benchmark's buildings are not yours and the first bad quarter turns it into a reason to stop reporting.
Questions people ask about facility management KPI
How often should these be reported?
Monthly internally, annually to whoever holds the budget. The annual view is the one that matters, because the backlog and the cost per square foot only mean anything as a trend.
What is a good condition index?
That depends on the building, its age, its use and what your organization has previously accepted. Take the ratio from your own figures and have the conversation about what is tolerable rather than importing a threshold.
Can KPIs be kept without software?
The condition index and the cost per square foot, yes, from a worksheet. Preventive completion needs a schedule that records when work was actually done, which is the point at which a spreadsheet stops being enough.