How to measure success in the shop with the KPIs that matter

To find out if a fleet or shop's maintenance team is truly living up to its potential, there’s one critical thing management has to do, according to no-nonsense efficiency consultant Peter Cooper.

“Shop leaders need to manage with facts, not feelings,” he asserted.

The former director of operations for Iowa-based Merx Truck & Trailer—and present CEO of Ascend Consulting —expounded on this maxim with the hypothetical employee “Technician Jim,” who he said “might be a great guy who shows up on time with a positive attitude, but he may also be the guy who takes three hours to do a one-hour job.”

On the flipside, imagine a tech who routinely beats standard repair times, but exudes toxic vibes that poison your shop culture.

In both cases, facts—not feelings—must guide your assessment of their value, and more importantly, how to train them up on the hard and soft skills they lack.

And to do that, the best method is to focus on the key performance indicators that actually matter to your shop’s definition of success, not the ones that make you feel good.

Each shop has different priorities, but the KPIs that matter should lead to more uptime and profitability. But whatever area you want to improve, make sure you can capture and analyze the related data.

“Any goals must be measurable and attainable in some way, otherwise you won’t see improvement,” efficiency guru Cooper said.

Next, because this is a team effort, you have to make sure everyone involved understands the full picture and how the data relates to success.

“It’s essential for fleet maintenance departments to understand what they’re measuring and why,” said Ernest Acevedo, fleet maintenance director at DPV Transportation, a specialty passenger transportation company based in Everett, Massachusetts. “I’ve honestly been in rooms with other fleets where someone says, ‘We’re this percentage in this certain area.’ Okay, so now what? How are you going to use that measurement to make your shop better?”

If they can’t answer, it just might be the sort of esoteric data that feels good to boast about to colleagues, but won’t sway your C-suite or lead to success. The top brass want proven results that bring in more revenue, and the facts explaining how that did or did not happen.

We also want that for you, so we canvassed several experts to find out which KPIs will help you get your facts straight—and lead to a highly successful 2026. And that starts with a trio of technician metrics that serve as the engine for your shop health.

Using KPIs to drive improvement

Once a maintenance director or shop owner has a way to record and measure all of these technician KPIs, is it simply a matter of looking at the data and deciding if "Technician Jim" gets a raise or gets shown the door? Not at all. While numbers are never supposed to lie, they can sometimes be misleading, failing to tell the whole truth.

“I was working with a shop owner who was concerned that a good technician’s direct labor had slipped down to around 60%,” Cooper said. “So I went to the shop one morning to observe. I noticed that the technician clocked in at 8 a.m., but then had to walk all the way across the shop floor, past six bays, to get to the service window. Then he had to stand there for at least 10 minutes while the service advisor was on the phone. By the time he was handed his first job and walked back to his bay, 20 minutes had flown by. That’s not the technician’s fault. That’s a problem with the process.”

Similarly, a technician’s low direct labor rate could be due to unorganized scheduling or parts management failures. “A technician can’t finish a PM on time if he has to wait for an oil filter to be delivered,” said John Whittet, chief customer officer at Fullbay, a provider of fleet maintenance and shop management software.

On the other hand, if a technician is constantly disorganized, outside smoking, or fiddling with their phone, that’s obviously a different story.

A low labor productivity (or technician efficiency) KPI could also be misleading. Cooper said   the No. 1 goal is to make sure your shop’s SRTs are accurate and fair. Secondly, there could be unique circumstances causing a tech's actual time to exceed the standard repair time, such as having to deal with a lot of rust, road salt, seized hardware, etc. Finally, it’s the shop manager’s job to ensure that service advisors are doing a good job with their initial diagnosis, so techs aren’t set up to fail right out of the gate.

In other words, shop managers shouldn’t go blaming the technician until they’re able to put any given KPI into the proper context.

“The job of the manager is to find out the root cause of why a technician isn’t meeting their KPI goal,” Saltzgiver said. “Shop managers should be having one-on-ones with their technicians at least once a month, preferably every two weeks. Then they can go through the metrics together and make sure everyone understands what’s really going on.”

Don’t forget about attitude and behavior

Data-driven KPIs, as previously described, are an important part of measuring technician performance. But those metrics alone cannot be the measure of success.

And though Cooper went on about facts over feelings, he never said to completely ignore feelings. Some feelings, like employee attitude, can be measured and therefore quantifiably improved.

“Much like marketers use net promoter scores to measure how consumers feel about their brand, shops can measure how their technicians feel about their jobs and co-workers,” he explained.

To do so, he suggested managers send out quarterly surveys to techs asking if they receive enough support from leadership and if they get along with co-workers.

“This type of data is more subjective, but provides valuable insights into how individual technicians and the shop as a whole are performing,” Cooper added.

Acevedo noted that a tech’s psychology is a big part of their overall value to a shop. This refers to behavioral traits like hustle, follow-through, and genuine care. Overachieving technicians are focused on productivity, but are also careful to avoid cutting corners. Overachievers treat drivers with respect and are pleasant to be around in the shop.

“Those are the things that don’t show up in maintenance software,” Acevedo said. “A shop manager needs to observe how their technicians act in the shop. All you have to do is watch a person work to see if they care, are sloppy, or have no sense of urgency. These things don’t show up on a time clock, but can cost a fleet dearly.”

As shop-level managers observe these traits and behaviors, Acevedo said their findings should be documented in a technician’s personnel file. Then, when the time comes to conduct an official performance review or simply have a one-on-one meeting, the information is there to be discussed. This helps keep everyone focused on meeting the set standards.

But shops must have clearly defined roles and expectations if they expect technicians to meet certain standards. What skills, trainings, certifications, and behaviors should a technician possess? Every shop must figure this out for itself—and communicate it to its technicians.

Schuier has been working on this very thing at Jetco Delivery. For a Level 1 technician, it’s about attitude and ambition as much as anything else.

“We want our Level 1s to have certain skills, of course,” Schuier said. “We also want them to show up on time, ask questions, gladly help clean the shop when asked, etc.”

As for a Level 2 technician, Schuier said measuring success depends on the situation. Some Level 2 technicians have no interest in rising to a management-type role. That’s okay. “Here I like to find other ways of challenging and motivating them,” Schuier related. “Maybe they would like to attend some training on electrical or diagnostics so they can help with more complex jobs that a Level 3 technician would do. On the other hand, they might be content just doing what they’re doing, even if it’s just PM-related work. That’s okay too, as long as they’re doing a good job with a good attitude.”

As for the most experienced Level 3 technicians, Schuier wants them to help build Jetco’s culture of growing from within.

“I’m looking for technicians who provide leadership and have others look up to them,” Schuier said. “I’m also looking for an attitude where they’re able to see the bigger picture and are willing to stay late to finish a job, for example. They should also be good at maintaining excellent communication with our operations team.”

In other words, Schuier likes to see her experienced technicians begin exhibiting the qualities of a good shop manager. That way, she knows when these technicians are ready to rise from generating  KPIs to analyzing them, making their shop a more efficient, productive place.