Equipment dashboard: utilization, availability and cost

An equipment dashboard compares utilization, availability and maintenance cost for the same assets over the same reporting period. Start with scheduled hours, recorded operating states and posted maintenance costs, then show both the ratios and their underlying hours. A machine that is available but idle needs a different investigation from one that is unavailable for repair.

Define what the hours mean

For this dashboard, scheduled hours are the hours an asset was assigned to the operating schedule. Unavailable hours are scheduled hours when it could not operate, including maintenance stops within that schedule. Running hours are hours actually operating; available idle hours are the remaining scheduled hours.

These are reporting definitions for the example. Agree on them before comparing assets, since organizations use different utilization denominators. Keep hours outside the schedule outside every calculation here. An asset held as emergency backup should also be identified as such rather than ranked against a production machine without context.

Availability = (Scheduled hours − Unavailable hours) / Scheduled hours

Utilization = Running hours / Scheduled hours

Maintenance cost per running hour = Maintenance labor and parts cost / Running hours

The Department of Energy's operations and maintenance guidance connects maintenance with equipment availability, operating needs and preservation of asset value. That makes a combined operating and cost view useful: no single percentage describes all those outcomes.

For production output and rejected units, use the separate production dashboards guide. This equipment view stays at the asset and operating-hour level.

Bring together the source rows

An illustrative Ohio manufacturer, Lakeview Components, reviews its equipment for September 2026. Its operating export contains an asset ID, date, shift, scheduled hours, unavailable hours and running hours. Its maintenance export contains transaction ID, asset ID, posting date, labor cost and parts cost.

Keep the original exports separately. Summarize operating hours by asset and reporting period, summarize maintenance dollars to the same level, and then match those summaries. Attaching one asset's monthly maintenance total to every operating-log row would multiply the cost.

The following table is the complete input for the worked example, after that aggregation. All costs are posted maintenance expenses; no depreciation, energy or estimated lost output is included.

Different schedules are intentional. Lathe L1 was scheduled for fewer hours, so its performance should be assessed against its own schedule. The table does not imply it could make the same products or replace either press.

Work the dashboard from those inputs

Calculate available hours by subtracting unavailable hours from scheduled hours. Subtract running hours from available hours to get available idle hours. Add labor and parts before dividing by running hours.

Percentages are rounded to one decimal place and costs per hour to two; calculations use unrounded inputs. For Press P2, availability is (160 − 40) / 160 = 75.0%, utilization is 80 / 160 = 50.0%, and maintenance cost per running hour is (3,200 + 2,800) / 80 = $75.00.

The total availability is 378 / 440 = 85.9%. Total utilization is 290 / 440 = 65.9%, and the total cost rate is 10,500 / 290 = $36.21. Divide summed numerators by summed denominators instead of averaging the displayed asset percentages or dollar rates.

Press P2 deserves a joint review by operations and maintenance. It has both unavailable time and available idle time. Maintenance can investigate the stop reasons; operations can investigate why the equipment did not run during the hours it was capable of running. Neither column alone establishes a root cause.

If the question includes production speed and first-pass quality, use OEE dashboards alongside this view. Utilization by itself does not measure those losses.

Prove the hours and dollars before acting

Every asset must satisfy the same identity:

Scheduled hours = Unavailable hours + Available idle hours + Running hours

For Press P1, 16 + 24 + 120 = 160. For Press P2, 40 + 40 + 80 = 160. For Lathe L1, 6 + 24 + 90 = 120. Across the dashboard, 62 + 88 + 290 = 440 scheduled hours.

The dollar check is separate: 5,900 + 4,600 = $10,500, which must match the maintenance transactions included in this report. Reconcile that export to the corresponding ledger cost accounts, with any excluded assets or outside services listed explicitly. A cost with a missing asset ID belongs in an unresolved bucket until it is assigned, rather than silently disappearing.

Keep maintenance spending separate from estimated business losses. NIST's manufacturing maintenance research examines both maintenance costs and losses associated with inadequate maintenance. The distinction matters here: the $10,500 is recorded expense, and the hour table supplies no selling price, contribution margin or evidence of lost demand from which to calculate a lost-profit figure.

The same separation of asset operating history and financial effects also matters in oil and gas analytics, where equipment supports different operating activities.

Change one input: more running time

Suppose the plant tests a scheduling scenario in which Press P2 runs for 100 hours instead of 80. Keep its schedule, unavailable hours and maintenance dollars unchanged. This isolates the effect of converting available idle time into running time; it does not assume a repair improvement or promise a saving.

Utilization increases by 12.5 percentage points because (100 − 80) / 160 = 12.5%. The cost rate falls to 6,000 / 100 = $60.00, even though maintenance expense has not fallen. Availability also stays unchanged. This is why a lower cost per running hour should not automatically be reported as maintenance savings.

Where it goes wrong

• Changing the schedule after the fact. Removing hours because an asset broke makes availability look better. Preserve the agreed schedule and disclose approved revisions.
• Overlapping stop records. Two work orders can describe the same outage. Count the elapsed unavailable time once, even when several maintenance jobs occurred within it.
• Mixing date bases. September operating hours with costs selected by payment date can omit accrued work or include older repairs. State the cost posting basis and handle late entries consistently.
• Treating absent records as zero. A missing meter reading or unmatched cost transaction is an exception to investigate. An asset with no running hours has an undefined cost-per-hour ratio, so show the dollars and an unavailable ratio.
• Ranking unlike assets as substitutes. Duty, product, age and backup responsibilities affect the comparison. Use the dashboard to choose an investigation, then review the operating context.

Analyze your own equipment file in Covirage

Bring an operating-log file and maintenance costs summarized to the same asset and period, or a Google Sheet containing those rows. Covirage maps the columns, and its tools compute utilization, availability and cost rates and check the supplied totals; the external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account, which takes about a minute, then set up your business and bring a sample of your own data.

See Covirage for industrial manufacturers for the manufacturing context.