What Is Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)?

Mean time to repair (MTTR), which measures how long it takes to restore a system after something breaks, is an important business metric that ties directly into the bottom line and customer satisfaction. The faster the MTTR, the less downtime a system experiences and the more productive a business can be. For critical systems, such as manufacturing equipment and financial technology, lower MTTR directly translates into improved profitability. Proactive management of MTTR takes operational discipline, strong asset management and effective allocation of maintenance resources. This article explores how MTTR is calculated, the factors that impact this metric and what businesses can do to improve their MTTR numbers.

What Is Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)?

MTTR is a field services and incident response metric that companies use to measure how efficiently a team or individual handles incidents and/or maintenance calls. MTTR represents the average time it takes to diagnose and fix systems that are malfunctioning or broken, be they machines, computers, networks or software.

MTTR is often used in concert with mean time between failure (MTBF), an operational resilience metric that tracks the average time between malfunctions. Taken together, these two metrics provide a solid assessment of a system’s resilience and can make it easier for business leaders to track how equipment problems and repair work affect uptime and profitability.

Key Takeaways

• Mean time to repair (MTTR) calculates the average time it takes for a company to repair a system.
• MTTR directly impacts system uptime and is a crucial business performance metric.
• Poor MTTR can indicate issues with field service management and asset management.
• Factors that impact MTTR include the age and complexity of a system, the skills of a maintenance team, the tools available to technicians and the knowledge base and standard procedures that guide them.
• Strong asset management and preventive maintenance, along with effective allocation of response resources, can drive down MTTR.

Mean Time to Repair Explained

MTTR stands as a key metric for field service management, maintenance teams, incident response teams and any other group or individual responsible for keeping equipment or facilities up and running. This includes everything from manufacturing equipment and car fleets to computers and software. MTTR is often used as a key performance indicator (KPI) by a range of business and technical decision-makers across industries because it acts as a bellwether of efficiency and resilience on a number of fronts. For example, poor or declining MTTR can often offer clues about:

• Operational inefficiencies
• Problems with field service processes
• Poor incident response planning
• Resource allocation issues within maintenance teams
• Operational costs of aging equipment
• System quality issues causing increased downtime

More importantly, MTTR performance has a direct downstream impact on the bottom line. The longer repair windows are open, the more downtime an organization experiences, and the more integral the malfunctioning system is to productivity or creation of goods, the more costly that downtime will be. Additionally, excessive MTTR can negatively impact customer satisfaction as well as the employee experience.

Because MTTR is tied to so many crucial operational and maintenance processes, this metric is often used as part of service level agreements (SLAs) to set speed of service expectations for maintenance and service contracts. In addition, many companies use MTTR for internal benchmarking and to track the performance impact of process changes. Often, MTTR is used in combination with other important maintenance KPIs, such as MTBF, to provide a fuller picture of the availability and reliability of equipment and technology systems.

One of the blind spots of using MTTR as a performance metric to reduce downtime is that it doesn’t reflect the full downtime that a system suffers during an outage. For example, if there are issues in identifying a problem, there could be significant lag time between when the malfunction occurs and when the repair process begins. This can be of particular concern for IT use cases, such as software performance management or cybersecurity, in which a malfunction may be less apparent than when a physical piece of equipment simply stops running. In these situations, companies often use a different MTTR — mean time to recovery — which is the average time it takes to recover from a system failure, from the inception of the issue until it’s fully resolved. This factors detection time into the equation.

How to Calculate Mean Time to Repair

MTTR calculates the average amount of time that repair windows are open. To determine MTTR, take the total amount of time an asset (or set of assets) is down during repair over a given time period and divide that number by the total number of incidents or service calls made for that asset (or set of assets) over that same time period:

MTTR = Total downtime/Total number of incidents

So, if a maintenance team overseeing a manufacturing production line spent 40 hours assessing and fixing downed machinery on that line in a financial quarter, and it made those repairs across 25 incidents, the MTTR would be:

MTTR = 40 hours/25 incidents = 1 hour and 36 minutes

The total repair time is usually calculated from the time maintenance staff is alerted about an issue through the time the system is once again operational. This includes the time it takes to diagnose and assess the issue on the front end of the process, as well as the time taken to test the fixes on the back end. Companies typically won’t include the lead time it takes for parts to be delivered, but they will include the time it takes to find and use spare parts they already own.

7 Factors Influencing Mean Time to Repair

MTTR performance can be affected by a number of influences, from how well teams collaborate to how skilled they are at making fixes. The state of the systems themselves and the environments in which they operate also play a role in determining how long it typically takes to repair them. The following list breaks down seven of the biggest factors affecting MTTR.

1. Equipment Complexity and Condition

The complexity and condition of the equipment under repair play a huge role in MTTR. A complex machine with a lot of integrated circuitry, proprietary software and many custom parts, for instance, will likely take considerably more time for a crew to assess and fix than a simple mechanical device. Similarly, aging and/or poorly maintained equipment often takes much longer to repair than newer machinery and could potentially experience additional breakage during the initial repair, contributing to higher MTTR in the process.

2. Availability of Spare Parts

While supply chain delays typically aren’t reflected in MTTR performance, inventory management headaches most definitely affect this metric. If maintenance crews have a hard time tracking down and obtaining spare parts from their internal inventory stores, this will lengthen measured repair windows and drive up MTTR over time. Not only do spare parts need to be readily available, but also the maintenance team needs to know their whereabouts and how to physically access them in a speedy manner in order to shorten MTTR.

3. Tools and Technology

The right tools and technology to diagnose and fix issues can make all the difference in improving MTTR. If technicians are working without the proper tools, they could end up worsening problems and lengthening repair times. And just as with spare parts, if technicians must constantly hunt to find specific tools purpose-fit for repairing specialty equipment, this will adversely affect MTTR.

4. Maintenance Team Skills and Availability

Skilled and experienced maintenance teams make fast repairs. If a company doesn’t have enough talent to respond to incidents and malfunctioning equipment, MTTR will suffer. Skilled and knowledgeable maintenance technicians can quickly diagnose issues, identify the necessary parts and tools and efficiently carry out repairs. Additionally, the availability of maintenance personnel is essential. When a sufficient number of technicians are on hand to respond to equipment failures, repairs can be initiated promptly, thereby reducing MTTR and increasing asset reliability.

5. Documentation and Knowledge Management

When tasked with fixing complex systems or maintaining a wide range of equipment, documentation and knowledge management are key for speeding up MTTR. Clear and concise documentation on affected systems can greatly reduce recovery time, as technicians have access to the necessary information to diagnose and resolve issues quickly. A robust knowledge management system, such as a comprehensive knowledge base, enables IT teams to resolve incidents faster by providing crucial problem management records, step-by-step response practices and workarounds. Additionally, incident postmortems and lessons learned from previous issues can be documented and shared, allowing teams to prevent future incidents or resolve them more efficiently the next time they occur.

6. Maintenance Procedures and Policies

Well-defined repair processes can greatly improve MTTR compared with having technicians stumble their way through ad hoc repairs. Formalizing maintenance procedures and policies makes it easier for companies to optimize repair times, especially across a team with varying skill sets and experience levels. What’s more, when businesses develop and enforce maintenance procedures, they’re better able to maintain standards for quality and safety as well.

7. Environmental Conditions

Environmental conditions are an external variable that can play a big role in MTTR performance. Equipment in hazardous, remote or extreme weather environments is harder to access and also likely to require more extensive repairs than systems in ideal environments. While maintenance organizations can’t always control environmental conditions, they can mitigate these issues with appropriate tools and procedures that make it easier and safer to do unplanned maintenance in harsh conditions. For example, having the right personal protective equipment, such as cold-weather gear, can enable technicians to safely perform unplanned maintenance tasks in extreme temperatures. Similarly, having access to the necessary tools and equipment, such as portable lighting, generators and specialized repair kits, can make it easier for teams to diagnose and fix issues in remote or difficult-to-access locations.

Benefits of Measuring Mean Time to Repair

Measuring MTTR can help businesses hold teams and individual technicians accountable for performance standards on multiple levels. Other benefits include:

• Enhanced benchmarking capabilities: MTTR offers a reliable metric for comparing operational performance of an organization or team against industry standards. Similarly, it can be used to compare internal teams or even the individual performance of maintenance staff, incident responders or field service employees.
• Improved maintenance efficiency evaluation: High MTTR can indicate inefficiency in maintenance procedures. Tracking MTTR over time while making improvements can help maintenance teams optimize their processes for speed and efficiency.
• Smarter resource allocation: Poor MTTR performance could indicate issues in allocation of maintenance resources — not only staff, but also tools and spare parts. Companies that notice certain equipment or facilities with high MTTR compared with broader benchmarks may want to allocate more tools or technicians to improve those numbers.
• Maximized equipment uptime: Faster MTTR means more uptime. Companies that identify and address the issues delaying repairs and negatively impacting MTTR will boost their equipment uptime and business productivity in the process.
• Substantial cost savings: Driving down MTTR and boosting uptime will ultimately result in substantial cost savings. Speedy return to service helps companies avoid lost productivity and increase production capacity.

Industry Application of Mean Time to Repair

MTTR is used by a range of industries to measure maintenance and resilience performance. The following are four of the most common industry use cases.

Manufacturing

With some of the highest downtime costs of any industry, manufacturing firms pay particularly close attention to MTTR benchmarks for assets across production lines, warehouses and other mission-critical facilities. Reducing MTTR is crucial for minimizing lost production time, meeting customer orders and improving overall equipment effectiveness. Manufacturers aim to lower MTTR by standardizing repair procedures, providing technicians with better tools and training, leveraging predictive analytics and optimizing spare parts inventory.

Energy and Utilities

Energy and utilities companies strive to maintain uninterrupted service to meet high customer expectations and maintain the integrity of their infrastructure. MTTR serves as a crucial performance metric to help companies in this industry expedite repairs, restore services promptly and minimize the consequences of downtime on consumers and businesses that depend on their critical infrastructure.

Information Technology (IT) and Telecommunications

IT and telecommunications firms use MTTR to track their efforts in dealing with issues such as network outages, software glitches and cybersecurity incidents. With so much of modern business dependent on seamless connectivity, online transactions and always-on access to data, MTTR in IT settings is one of the most important performance benchmarks for maintaining service levels and customer satisfaction. MTTR helps track the efficacy of measures such as proactive monitoring and automated incident response in minimizing IT disruptions.

Finance and Banking

Financial institutions must ensure the reliable availability of payment processing systems, systems of record and even ATMs in order to maintain the trust and satisfaction of their customers. As such, finance and banking firms use the MTTR metric to help gauge their teams’ effectiveness in detecting, assessing and resolving technical issues that could threaten the transactional resilience of the institution.

Strategies for Improving Mean Time to Repair

Field service management and maintenance teams can tackle lengthy repair windows through the following strategies, all of which serve to improve MTTR.

1. Implement routine checks: Routine checks of equipment for significant wear and tear and other signs of damage can help direct preventive maintenance that forestalls the kind of major malfunctions that require significant time to repair.
2. Use predictive maintenance: Predictive maintenance takes routine checks to another level by using IoT sensors, telemetry and other data to more accurately predict when preventive care should be taken to avoid hard-to-fix failures.
3. Enhance training and skill development: Bolstering the skills of maintenance technicians and incident responders through regular training will improve productivity and accelerate technicians’ ability to assess and fix the systems under their care.
4. Create repair-task SOPs: Repair-task standard operating procedures (SOPs) and incident response playbooks offer step-by-step guidance to staff out in the field, reducing the amount of time they spend figuring out what to do next in their service work.
5. Create maintenance checklists: Maintenance checklists are a manual method for keeping technicians on task with routine maintenance that keeps machines from succumbing to hard-to-fix outages.
6. Leverage maintenance management software: As opposed to simple checklists, maintenance management software adds tracking, automation and alert capabilities to help companies streamline management of both planned and unplanned maintenance.
7. Use remote monitoring: Remote monitoring makes it easier to continuously check the status and condition of systems in order to detect damage earlier so technicians can make fixes before bigger problems arise.
8. Optimize spare parts management: Keeping track of an organized inventory of spare parts, establishing naming and coding standards for these parts and managing inventory based on criticality can speed up MTTR by reducing the time it takes to find and obtain necessary parts during repairs.
9. Keep detailed records of maintenance activities: Detailed records of maintenance activities make it easier to plan out preventive maintenance and can help technicians more quickly assess problems when systems break down.
10. Encourage feedback from maintenance staff: Establishing a feedback loop for maintenance staff to communicate about what works and what doesn’t during an outage or incident can help inform future SOPs and streamline processes.
11. Employ advanced diagnostics and mobile tools: Advanced diagnostics and mobile technologies enable maintenance teams to dramatically reduce MTTR by streamlining the repair process. Smart sensors and monitoring systems rapidly detect failures the moment they occur, allowing for immediate response. Integrated mobile tools, meanwhile, provide technicians with advanced diagnostics capabilities, empowering them to quickly pinpoint root causes and determine the optimal repair approach.
12. Establish rapid response teams: Keeping rapid response teams on call for critical systems can eliminate lengthy wait times that stem from managing technicians across a large portfolio of assets. Having pros waiting to jump on outages immediately can have a decidedly positive impact on MTTR.
13. Use instant communication platforms: For complex systems and serious outages, maintenance and incident response teams will need to collaborate closely to assess, fix and test repairs. Messaging systems are vital for keeping everyone on track without having to wait for email responses or returned phone calls.
14. Prioritize safety and compliance: Prioritizing safety and compliance is key for improving MTTR. By ensuring that technicians have the proper training and personal protective equipment and follow standardized safety protocols, companies can minimize delays and disruptions caused by accidents or injuries during the repair process. Adhering to relevant industry regulations and internal compliance standards also helps streamline repairs by providing clear guidelines on how to safely diagnose, maintain and restore equipment. When safety and compliance are top priorities, technicians can work more efficiently without worrying about potential hazards, and companies can avoid costly fines or production shutdowns due to regulatory violations.

Reduce Your MTTR with the Right Tool: NetSuite

Improving MTTR requires meticulous attention to detail and effective planning. NetSuite Field Service Management software can help field service organizations increase efficiency and free themselves of the operational burdens that drag down their MTTR performance. NetSuite provides an integrated platform that makes it simple to do drag-and-drop scheduling, optimize office-to-field communication and automate workflows for technicians tasked with fixing equipment out in the field.

NetSuite Field Management also provides a single place to manage assets, track preventive maintenance and keep tabs on spare parts inventory. Everything is supported by robust reporting and analytics that allow decision-makers to optimize workflows along the way.

MTTR is a critical metric for business performance across a range of sectors. Maintenance teams, field service organizations and incident responders that commit to driving down MTTR can help the business maximize operational resources and minimize downtime. Through a layered approach that invests in tools, training and processes around diagnosing and fixing problems — as well as optimizing preventive maintenance — companies can make continual gains on their MTTR performance.

Mean Time to Repair FAQs

How do you calculate mean time to repair?

Mean time to repair is calculated by taking the total repair time and dividing it by the number of outages or incidents during a given time period.

What is an acceptable MTTR?

The acceptability of an MTTR is highly dependent on the systems in question and the industry an organization operates in. An acceptable MTTR in a non-critical IT server may be five hours, while a critical program logic controller in a power plant might have an MTTR of five minutes.

What is the mean time to repair format?

Mean time to repair is typically expressed as a value of time, such as seconds, minutes, hours or days.

What are the 4 key metrics of MTTR?

The acronym MTTR can stand for one of four different metrics: mean time to repair, mean time to respond, mean time to recovery or mean time to restore.

What are MTTR and MTBF?

Mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between failure (MTBF) are two operational reliability metrics. MTTR is the average time it takes to repair a malfunctioning system, while MTBF is the average time between outages due to equipment failure.