PM Compliance
The percentage of scheduled preventive maintenance tasks completed on time — the basic health indicator of a maintenance program.
PM compliance measures whether the preventive maintenance program that exists on paper happens in reality: PMs completed within their allowed window divided by PMs due in the period. A common convention grants a grace window of 10 percent of the PM interval (the '10 percent rule' — a monthly PM counts as compliant if done within three days of its due date). Below roughly 90 percent on critical assets, a PM program starts to be theoretical.
The metric's value is as a leading indicator. Downtime and MTBF respond to maintenance quality with a lag of months; PM compliance responds within a week to understaffing, schedule chaos, or a system misconfiguration that stopped generating work. When compliance slips, reliability problems are already in the mail.
Two failure modes corrupt the metric: pencil-whipping, where tasks are marked complete without being done — countered with photo evidence, meter readings, and spot audits — and compliance theater, where teams hit the number by prioritizing trivial PMs over critical ones. Weighting compliance by asset criticality keeps the number honest.
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