Repair Station KPIs: The Eight Numbers Worth Watching

Ask ten repair station owners how the shop is doing and you get ten different answers, most of them a feeling. Busy. Slammed. Slow month. The bank statement settles the argument eventually, but by then the quarter is closed and whatever caused it happened eight weeks ago.

Repair station KPIs are just the handful of numbers that let you see a problem while you can still do something about it. You do not need twenty five of them. A shop under fifty people can run on eight, and most of those already exist inside the work orders you write every day.

The repair station KPIs worth watching

1. Turn time, promised against actual

Measure from aircraft in the door to release, not from when the tech first touched it. Then set the promised number next to it. A shop with a four day average and a two day promise has a sales problem, not a maintenance problem. Track it by job type, because an annual, a phase, and a squawk chase are three different animals and averaging them together hides both the good and the bad.

2. Labor utilization

Billable job hours divided by clock hours. This is the number that explains the gap between what payroll paid for and what the invoices collected. It only works if techs clock to the job as they go instead of reconstructing hours on Friday afternoon, and if every non-billable activity has a bucket. Shop cleanup, training, hangar moves, and warranty rework need somewhere to land or they quietly land on a customer's job. We went deeper on this in aviation shop time clock and labor tracking.

3. Estimate variance

Quoted hours against actual hours, one number per closed work order. After a dozen jobs you stop guessing. You will know whether your annual quote is honest or whether you have been donating ten hours an airplane for two years because the quote was built in 2019 and never revisited.

4. Add work capture

Discrepancies found during a job versus discrepancies that made it onto the invoice. This is usually the biggest pile of free work in the building. It stays invisible unless every squawk becomes a line item the moment somebody finds it, with a customer approval attached to it.

5. Parts margin and stockout delays

Two halves of one question. Margin tells you whether your markup survived contact with freight, cores, and the vendor who raised prices in March. Stockout delays, meaning hours or days a job sat waiting on a part, tell you what your stocking policy costs in turn time.

6. Rework and warranty hours

Hours spent on your own comebacks. Nobody likes tracking this one. It is also the fastest read on training gaps and on whether the shop is rushing releases to make a month end number.

7. Aged work in process

Open work orders sorted by age, and the unbilled dollars sitting inside them. A job that has been open forty days is a customer approval problem, a parts problem, or a forgotten problem. All three get worse quietly, and all three are cash you already spent.

8. Compliance leading indicators

Tools coming due for calibration, technician training and authorizations about to expire, and closed work orders missing a document. These are not business metrics. They are the ones that decide whether an audit is an afternoon or a week, which is the same territory covered in our Part 145 audit checklist. What has to be tracked, and at what interval, is set by your own Repair Station Manual, Quality Control Manual, and ops specs. None of this is legal advice, and your PMI's reading is the one that counts.

How often to look

Weekly is enough for the operational four: WIP aging, turn time, utilization, and compliance flags. Monthly is fine for estimate variance, parts margin, and rework, because those need volume before they mean anything. Anything you look at less than monthly is not a KPI, it is a report.

Put the weekly numbers somewhere the crew can see them. A whiteboard in the break room beats a dashboard nobody opens.

Where the numbers come from

Here is the practical catch. If pulling these eight numbers means exporting from the work order system, the time clock, the parts spreadsheet, and QuickBooks, then reconciling them by hand, you will do it twice and quit.

The numbers get easy when the work order is the system of record and everything else hangs off it. Orion is built that way: discrepancies live inside the work order, technician time clocks against the job, parts and purchasing sit alongside it, and QuickBooks sync carries the result to accounting instead of somebody keying it twice. Orion is modular, so you can build a plan with just the pieces you need on published pricing, with unlimited users on every plan and add-on modules at $95 per month each.

Want to see these numbers falling out of live work orders instead of a spreadsheet? Schedule a call and we will walk through a job from quote to invoice.