Your CMMS can generate reports showing the cost of maintaining each asset. Armed with such reports, management can make informed, intelligent decisions about replacing or upgrading equipment. If the cost is high enough, they can correctly decide to shut down a particular operation for one that’s more profitable (and thus keep people employed).
If you are grading individual maintenance personnel on the labor time metric, you may be encouraging cheating and thus inaccurate information. Not just for labor hours, but for other costs such as materials.
A common (mis)management technique is to charge every 15 minutes of the work day to some activity. This can create a high pressure environment, one in which fear over-rides the need for accuracy. The solution is to use the “pressure relief valve” of an “Other” category and clearly communicate that you are collecting meta data only and people aren’t being graded on what they report as long as it’s honest.
Make a thoughtful analysis of how your system leads to data skewing, and fix those problems.
