CMMS Benchmarking: What "Good" Looks Like in 2025

Most maintenance teams know their CMMS should be driving better planning, clearer insights and fewer breakdowns. But in 2025, the gap between companies who use their CMMS well and those who don't has widened dramatically.

The leaders have real-time visibility, accurate asset histories, automated reporting and data that supports evidence-based decisions.

The laggards still fight their CMMS every week—missing data, inconsistent fields, no PM compliance visibility and endless manual reports.

This guide defines what "good" CMMS performance actually looks like in 2025, how to measure it and what metrics real plants use to benchmark their performance.

It is designed for:

• Maintenance planners
• Reliability engineers
• Maintenance managers
• Engineering leaders responsible for uptime, cost and safety

Why CMMS Benchmarking Matters More Than Ever

For most plants, maintenance spend is increasing while technical labour is getting harder to find. Operating environments are harsher, regulatory requirements are stricter and plants are expected to hit higher OEE with smaller teams.

Benchmarking gives teams:

• A clear definition of what success looks like
• Early warning indicators when performance drops
• A roadmap to move from reactive firefighting to predictable operations
• A shared language for maintenance, finance and operations to align around

In a data-driven world, CMMS performance IS maintenance performance. If the system is inaccurate, incomplete or slow, the whole department suffers.

What "Good" CMMS Performance Looks Like in 2025

Based on cross-industry trends, high-performing plants in 2025 share the same characteristics.

Below are the core benchmarks used to evaluate whether a CMMS is delivering value.

1. PM Compliance: 80–90% (with near-zero overdue critical tasks)

Preventive Maintenance (PM) completion rate is the first benchmark most leaders review.

In high-performing plants:

• 80–90% of PMs are completed on time
• Critical PMs (Category A or Safety/Critical Assets) have less than 2% overdue
• PM workload is properly balanced, not stacked at month-end

Low performers experience:

• PM ballooning—dozens or hundreds of overdue tasks
• Backlog spikes after shutdowns
• Planners constantly rescheduling work

2025 Benchmark: 80–90% PM compliance, <2% overdue critical PMs

2. Reactive Work Ratio: Under 20–30%

Reactive work is the clearest indicator of maintenance maturity.

High-performing teams operate with:

• 20–30% or less reactive work
• Most work planned at least 1 week ahead
• Technicians rarely called off jobs to chase breakdowns

Plants stuck above 50–60% reactive spend more time firefighting than improving.

2025 Benchmark: <30% reactive work for stable operations

3. Backlog Health: 4–6 Weeks of Work

A healthy backlog:

• Includes all work fully scoped, prioritised and ready to schedule
• Is not missing safety jobs or PMs
• Is consistent across all assets and trades

Too little backlog means under-reporting or poor utilisation of the CMMS. Too much backlog signals labour shortages, planning failures or PM overload.

2025 Benchmark: 4–6 weeks total backlog, fully prioritised

4. Asset Cost-to-Failure Trends (CMMS + Finance Alignment)

High-performing teams monitor:

• Cost per asset
• Failure frequency
• Spare parts usage
• Repeat failures
• Run-to-failure vs repair cost trends

Plants with mature CMMS usage can identify the top 10 cost drivers within minutes, not days.

2025 Benchmark: Visibility of asset cost & failure trends at least monthly

5. Work Order Quality: 90%+ Complete and Accurate

Work order quality is the hidden killer of maintenance analytics. Benchmarking here covers:

• Correct asset selected
• Accurate start/finish dates
• Downtime fields filled
• Failure codes and cause codes used properly
• Labour hours captured
• Parts consumed recorded

Without quality data, asset strategies collapse.

2025 Benchmark: 90%+ of work orders meet quality standards

6. Schedule Compliance: 75–85% Each Week

High-performing teams track schedule compliance weekly, not monthly.

Good performance means:

• 75–85% of planned labour hours are completed
• The schedule is realistic (not overloaded with wishful thinking)
• Emergency work does not blow up the weekly plan
• Supervisors protect planned work windows

2025 Benchmark: 75–85% schedule compliance for steady-state operations

7. CMMS Reporting Load: Less Than 1 Hour per Week

The best teams automate:

• Weekly maintenance reports
• PM compliance dashboards
• Backlog summaries
• Downtime analysis
• Asset cost roll-ups

If a planner spends more than 2–3 hours a week on CMMS data cleaning, the system is not enabling them—it's slowing them down.

2025 Benchmark: <1 hour per week spent preparing reports

How to Benchmark Your CMMS in 2025 (Step-by-Step)

This is the exact benchmarking process used by high-performing maintenance teams.

Step 1: Gather core reports (standard across all CMMS)

Every CMMS, whether SAP PM, Maximo, MEX, UpKeep, Fiix or Maintenance Connection, has these exports:

• Work Orders
• PM Work Plans/Tasks
• Asset Register
• Downtime Logs
• Cost/Parts Usage

You cannot benchmark without these.

Step 2: Validate work order quality

Review:

• Missing failure codes
• Missing downtime entries
• Work orders with no asset
• Incorrect status usage
• Duplicate or repeated jobs

If the CMMS data is wrong, benchmark results will be distorted.

Step 3: Calculate the core KPIs

Benchmark the following:

• PM compliance
• Overdue PMs (all vs critical)
• Backlog size and age
• Reactive work ratio
• Mean time between failures (MTBF)
• Work order quality
• Schedule compliance
• Top 10 cost drivers
• Top 10 bad actors (high downtime or frequency)

Step 4: Compare your numbers to 2025 benchmarks

Create a simple table:

This instantly highlights bottlenecks.

Step 5: Identify root causes

Most issues come from:

• PMs not optimised
• Lack of planning capacity
• Incorrect job prioritisation
• Poor work order entry habits
• Work not scheduled realistically
• Backlog not reviewed weekly

Step 6: Build a 90-day improvement roadmap

Pick 3–5 KPIs that matter most.

Example:

1. Lift PM compliance from 60% to 80% – Rebalance PM schedules, clear overdue backlog
2. Reduce backlog from 12 weeks to 6 – Increase planner capacity, reject low-priority work
3. Improve schedule compliance from 65% to 80% – Protect planned work windows, reduce emergency interruptions
4. Increase work order quality from 70% to 90% – Train technicians on mandatory fields, audit weekly

Then assign weekly actions.

What Elite Teams Do Differently

From reviewing top-performing plants globally, these habits repeatedly show up.

1. They treat the CMMS as a source of truth

No parallel spreadsheets. No shadow maintenance logs. No "I'll fix it later" data entry.

2. They protect planning time

Planners are not technicians or "catch-all" roles. Their job is planning, scheduling and analysis—full stop.

3. They measure weekly, not monthly

Leading teams review KPIs every week:

• PM compliance
• Backlog
• Schedule compliance
• Reactive work

Because monthly data comes too late.

4. They use automation for boring work

Reporting, data cleanup and downtime summaries are automated so planners can focus on improvement.

5. They run disciplined asset reviews

Monthly or quarterly:

• Top 10 cost assets
• Repeat failures
• PM optimisation opportunities

Nothing improves without regular review.

Common CMMS Benchmarking Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Mistake 1: Relying on inaccurate data

Fix work order quality before benchmarking.

Mistake 2: Benchmarking without context

Seasonal shutdowns or labour shortages change baselines.

Mistake 3: Overloading PM schedules

More PMs does not mean better reliability. It often creates backlog chaos.

Mistake 4: Tracking too many KPIs

Focus on the 8–10 that drive business outcomes.

Mistake 5: Not involving operations

Maintenance cannot hit targets alone—operators must own basic care.

Quick Reference: 2025 CMMS Benchmarks Summary

How LeanReport Can Help

If you're spending hours each week extracting CMMS data, validating work orders, and building benchmarking reports manually, LeanReport automates the entire process.

Upload your CMMS export and get:

• Automatic KPI calculation – PM compliance, reactive work ratio, backlog analysis, schedule compliance
• Work order quality checks – Identifies missing fields, incorrect statuses, and incomplete records
• Benchmarking dashboards – Compare your performance against 2025 industry standards
• Professional Lean reports – Ready for management review and continuous improvement meetings
• AI-powered insights – Highlights root causes and recommended actions

Reduce your benchmarking time from days to minutes. Start your 14-day free trial or learn more about how it works.

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