The Operational Dashboard for Work Orders: Out-of-the-Box KPIs and the Maintenance Manager View

🎯 Who this is for: Maintenance managers and Maximo administrators who ran the day from a Start Center — and want to know what the new Operational Dashboard gives them before they commit to switching.

Series: Part 3 of 6 — MAS 9 Work Order Operations: The Missing Pieces | Read time: 15 minutes

The Strategic Replacement for Start Centers

For years, the maintenance manager's day started in one place: the Start Center. Result sets for overdue work, a KPI graph or two, a few quick-launch links. It was the command center, and everyone built theirs around the same muscle memory.

MAS 9 introduces a different command center — the Operational Dashboard — and IBM is explicit about its role: it is the strategic replacement for Start Centers as the maintenance manager's home screen. Card-based, modern, and preloaded with the metrics a maintenance operation actually watches.

Here's the part that matters for your rollout plan, in plain terms: Start Centers still work. This is not a rip-and-replace. "Strategic replacement" means the Operational Dashboard is where IBM is investing and where new capability lands — not that your Start Centers stopped functioning the day you upgraded. That distinction is the whole reason this post exists, and we'll come back to it when we get to the honest limitation.

This post is about consuming the dashboard — the KPIs you get for free and the pre-built view you can turn on today. Building your own custom KPIs is a bigger topic with its own workflow, and it's the subject of Part 4. And the live work-queue side of dashboards deserves its own treatment, which the MAS MANAGE series covers in Work Queue Manager.

📊 Old World vs. MAS 9

Capability — Start Center (classic) — MAS 9 Operational Dashboard

Role — Manager's command center — Strategic replacement command center

Still available? — Yes — Start Centers still work — Yes — new investment lands here

WO KPIs — Build from result sets / KPI graphs — Out-of-the-box WO KPIs included

Pre-built manager view — Configure your own template — Maintenance Manager dashboard ships ready

Layout — Portlet-based — Card-based — add, remove, rearrange, resize

Assign to a user / security group — Yes, via Start Center templates — Not yet (public/private only in 9.1)

Export — Limited — CSV, PNG, JPG

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💡 Key insight: The Operational Dashboard isn't just "a prettier Start Center." It ships with real work order KPIs already defined, so a maintenance manager can get a working command center without building a single result set. That's the change: less assembly required.

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📈 The KPIs You Get Without Building Anything

The reason the Operational Dashboard is worth turning on early is the out-of-the-box work order KPIs. These are defined for you — no Where Clause writing, no KPI Manager session — and they cover the metrics a maintenance operation lives and dies by:

KPI — What it tells you — How it's derived

Emergency Work Orders — How much of your load is emergency priority — Count of WOs with emergency priority

Overdue Work Orders — Work already past its target date — Scheduled finish earlier than the current date

Work Order Backlog — Open work that hasn't started — Count of open WOs in early statuses (WAPPR, APPR, WMATL, WSCH)

PM Compliance — Are preventive maintenance jobs done on time? — Completed on-time ÷ total scheduled

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) — Equipment reliability trend — Calculated from failure history

Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) — How long repairs actually take — Calculated from labor actual hours

There are two more IBM ships in the same family — a Planned vs. Unplanned Ratio (planned versus reactive work) and Asset Downtime (total downtime hours by asset) — rounding out a set that answers "how healthy is my maintenance operation right now?"

Notice what this list is: it's the standard maintenance scorecard, made available without a build phase. The moment you enable the dashboard, these are consumable.

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💡 Key insight: Treat the out-of-the-box KPIs as your baseline, not your ceiling. They're deliberately generic — emergency count, overdue count, PM compliance. When "overdue" or "backlog" means something specific to your site (a particular craft, a particular work type), that's a custom KPI, and that's Part 4. Start with these; extend later.

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🧰 The Pre-Built Maintenance Manager Dashboard

You don't have to assemble the manager view from scratch either. MAS 9 ships a Maintenance Manager dashboard preconfigured and ready to enable. Out of the box it arrives with:

  • An Emergency Work KPI card
  • A PM Compliance trend card
  • An Overdue WOs count card
  • A Backlog KPI card
  • A Work Queues integration card

And it's fully customizable — you can add, remove, rearrange, and resize cards to match how your team actually runs the shift. The pre-built layout is a starting point IBM chose because it maps to what most maintenance managers watch first; treat it as a sensible default you tune, not a fixed template you're stuck with.

The Work Queues card on that dashboard is a live window into your maintenance queues — but the queue engine behind it, Work Queue Manager, is a topic in its own right. We're not going to unpack how work queues are configured or managed here; that's owned by the MAS MANAGE series' Work Queue Manager article. On the dashboard, just know the card gives you a live count of WOs in each queue.

🃏 The Card Types Worth Knowing

The dashboard is built from cards, and a handful of card types do most of the work for work order management. You'll consume these constantly, so it's worth knowing what each one is for:

  • KPI Value — a single metric with its trend. This is your "overdue WO count, and is it getting worse?" tile.
  • KPI Trend — one metric over time, e.g., PM compliance across the last 12 months. This is how you tell a slow drift from a bad day.
  • Work Queues — a live count of WOs sitting in each maintenance queue (the card that connects to Work Queue Manager).
  • Threshold Tile (9.1) — a color-coded tile that turns a number into a signal. For PM compliance: green above 90%, yellow between 75% and 90%, red below 75%. New in MAS 9.1.

Two more are worth a mention because they show up on manager dashboards: a KPI Comparison card (backlog broken out by site, work type, or craft) and an External Content (9.0) card that embeds outside analytics like Power BI or Grafana directly onto the dashboard. There's also a plain Table card for listing critical work orders with their key fields, and a Quick Actions card for one-click launches like "Create Emergency WO."

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💡 Key insight: The Threshold Tile is the card that changes the meeting. A raw "PM compliance: 82%" makes people squint. A yellow tile makes the room react before anyone reads the number. If you're on 9.1, wire your compliance and backlog KPIs to threshold tiles — it's the cheapest way to make a dashboard decision-driving instead of informational.

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⚠️ The Honest 9.1 Limitation

Now the part you need to hear before you tell your managers to abandon their Start Centers.

Operational Dashboards in MAS 9.1 support public and private dashboards, and IBM's guidance is to govern that access rather than treat it as a free-for-all — define which dashboards are enterprise-standard, which are role-specific, and which are user-owned.

But here's the honest gap: you cannot yet assign a dashboard to specific users or specific security groups the way Start Center templates could. There is no fully personalized per-user view driven by security group in the way you're used to. Public-or-private is the granularity you have in 9.1 — not "this exact dashboard for the Electrical craft supervisors and a different one for the Reliability team," delivered automatically by group membership.

Do not assume the personalization model is identical to Start Centers. It isn't, yet.

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💡 Key insight: This one limitation is why "strategic replacement" is doing a lot of quiet work in IBM's phrasing. The Operational Dashboard is where things are heading, but the security-group-driven personalization that made Start Centers the daily home for dozens of distinct roles isn't fully there in 9.1. Plan for the destination; live in the present.

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Why many teams run both side by side

Put the two facts together — Start Centers still work, and 9.1 dashboards can't be assigned per security group — and the practical pattern falls out on its own: many teams run Start Centers and the Operational Dashboard side by side.

The Start Center keeps doing what it does well — role-specific, security-group-driven landing pages for every distinct job function. The Operational Dashboard becomes the shared command surface for scenarios where one common view is the point: shift handover, dispatch review, and the morning backlog meeting. Those are exactly the operational moments IBM calls out for shared dashboards, and they don't need per-user personalization — everyone's looking at the same board on purpose.

So the answer to "do I switch?" in 9.1 is usually "not entirely, not yet." You adopt the Operational Dashboard for the shared, big-screen, one-team-one-view scenarios, and you keep Start Centers for the personalized daily landing pages until the dashboard access model catches up.

📤 Getting Data Off the Dashboard

A command center that can't share its picture is only half useful. The Operational Dashboard supports export:

  • CSV — the underlying data, for the analyst who wants to pivot it themselves.
  • PNG / JPG — the visual, for the screenshot that goes in the shift-handover chat or the Monday report.

This is the small feature that makes the shared-dashboard pattern work in practice. The 7:00 a.m. backlog meeting looks at the live board; someone exports the backlog view as an image; it circulates to the crews who weren't in the room. No portlet-scraping, no manual screenshotting into a deck.

🔧 Practical Notes Before You Roll This Out

  • Enable the Maintenance Manager dashboard first. It's pre-built and it maps to what managers already watch. Turn it on, then tune cards — don't start from a blank canvas.
  • Don't decommission Start Centers in 9.1. The per-security-group assignment gap means your personalized role landing pages still belong in Start Centers. Run both.
  • Point the Operational Dashboard at shared scenarios. Shift handover, dispatch review, morning backlog. That's where a single public dashboard shines and where the personalization gap doesn't hurt.
  • Use out-of-the-box KPIs as your day-one baseline. Emergency, overdue, backlog, PM compliance are all ready. Save the custom, site-specific KPIs for a follow-up phase (Part 4).
  • Set governance early. Decide card ownership, KPI definition standards, refresh intervals, and naming conventions before people start creating private dashboards, or you'll be untangling them later.

Key Takeaways

  • The Operational Dashboard is IBM's strategic replacement for Start Centers as the maintenance manager's command center — but Start Centers still work, so this is not a rip-and-replace.
  • You get out-of-the-box WO KPIs — Emergency Work Orders, Overdue WOs, Backlog, PM Compliance, MTBF, MTTR — with no build phase, plus a pre-built, fully customizable Maintenance Manager dashboard.
  • The card types that carry WO management are KPI Value, KPI Trend, Work Queues, and the 9.1 Threshold Tile; export runs to CSV, PNG, and JPG.
  • The honest limitation: MAS 9.1 dashboards can't be assigned to specific users or security groups and offer no fully personalized per-user view — which is exactly why many teams run Start Centers and the Operational Dashboard side by side.

References

Series Navigation

Previous: — Part 2 — Work Order Approvals & E-Signatures

Next: — Part 4 — Building Custom Work Order KPIs

About TheMaximoGuys: We help Maximo developers and teams navigate the move to MAS 9 with practical, no-hype guidance grounded in how the platform actually behaves.

Published by TheMaximoGuys | July 2026