Maintenance Metric: In-House vs. Outsourced – What’s Healthier for Your Organization?

Working with hundreds of factories, we've noticed a recurring pattern: Almost no one tracks the ratio between internal maintenance work and work done by external contractors.

That’s a missed opportunity – because this ratio reveals a lot about the health of your maintenance operation.

Why does it matter?

The balance between in-house and outsourced maintenance work isn’t just a technical detail – it reflects your level of control, internal knowledge, flexibility, costs, and even operational risk.

For example:

• More than 70% in-house work often signals strong control and knowledge retention inside the organization – but it can also mean your maintenance team is overloaded.

• Less than 30% in-house work provides flexibility and access to specialists – but also leads to heavy contractor dependency and significantly higher costs.

What does this metric tell us?

Here are a few common insights we’ve seen across the board:

• Where there’s no internal knowledge, nothing gets fixed without a contractor.

• Relying on contractors may seem easy, but it often costs twice as much as internal staff.

• Investing in training always pays off. In-house knowledge leads to faster response times, flexibility, and long-term cost savings.

So what does this have to do with maintenance management software?

A smart maintenance management system helps you track, analyze, and optimize all your maintenance work – including how much is done internally vs. externally.

Maintenance management software like AnyMaint gives you the full picture at a glance:

• How many contractors are involved?

• Where is your internal team overloaded?

• Which areas require upskilling or additional support?

Now we’re asking you:

Do you measure this ratio in your organization?Do you know where you stand between internal work and outsourced tasks?

If not – now is the perfect time to start.

With a maintenance management software like AnyMaint, you can gain full visibility, optimize your workflows, and build a healthier maintenance strategy – based on real data, not guesswork.

Want to see how it looks in action? Let’s talk.