In simple terms, a maintenance backlog refers to outstanding maintenance work. It is a vital maintenance metric that helps you to understand how to organize your work orders.
What counts as outstanding maintenance work depends on who you ask. For example, some facilities classify any maintenance work that hasn’t been carried out as part of their maintenance backlog. Others count only maintenance tasks that haven’t been scheduled, meaning that if specific planned maintenance activities haven’t been done, but work orders already exist for them, the activities don’t form part of the maintenance backlog.
How to Measure Maintenance Backlog
To quantify maintenance backlog in concrete terms, maintenance planners and teams will often measure maintenance backlog in time. This time could be hours, days, weeks, or however long it takes to complete an outstanding maintenance operation. This metric also considers the available maintenance crew.
For example, imagine you have a maintenance process that involves seven tasks, each of which takes a full day of work for one worker. If you can only dedicate one maintenance technician to the task at a time, then you have a backlog of seven work days.
However, if you have a maintenance team of seven technicians who can work simultaneously on this outstanding maintenance task, then your total backlog is only one day.
Maintenance backlog doesn’t just include planned maintenance, however. Instead, it includes all outstanding maintenance activities: reactive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and predictive maintenance.
“The function of maintaining a clean backlog should be included in the job description for a designated maintenance position. It is one non-planning function that is appropriate to assign to a planner. It does not take much time, and the planner is in a position to know the status of all work orders in the area.”
Reliable Plant
Why Bother Organizing Your Maintenance Backlog?
One benefit of preventive maintenance is that it helps you maximize your resources. With good planning and scheduling, you can develop a maintenance program that ensures you catch minor problems before they become more significant and keep high-risk equipment on a preventive maintenance schedule. This is even more likely when you take advantage of predictive maintenance technologies.
However, staffing and budgetary challenges mean that effective planning is not always enough, and some facilities will always deal with some backlog of work. As such, good maintenance management is necessary to prevent continued deferred maintenance and increase asset performance.
“Without enough staff, maintenance backlogs get longer, and unplanned failures rise. Because unplanned work is more difficult and time-consuming to complete, staff availability declines even further, a spiral that eventually leads to excessive downtime, rising costs, and lost sales: exactly the situation companies want to avoid.”
McKinsey
Deferred maintenance refers to postponing necessary maintenance activities beyond their required minimum intervals. Over time, this can cause assets to deteriorate, increasing the likelihood of equipment failures, breakdowns, and downtime. Deferred maintenance can, in turn, lead to increased maintenance costs and a more complicated asset management process.
4 Steps to Managing Your Maintenance Backlog
1. Manage Work Requests
The first step in backlog management is to organize your work requests. Look closely at the outstanding work and verify how much constitutes a backlog. You don’t want to count duplicate work requests as part of your backlog.
Similarly, already completed work orders that weren’t closed out should be eliminated, along with work requests that workers have resolved outside the maintenance work process. Ensure you only have necessary, actionable work requests remaining before moving to the next step.
2. Organize Work Orders
Once you finish step one, create and organize work orders according to your prioritization system. Again, scrutinize the outstanding maintenance work and try to organize it in order of factors like time sensitivity.
You might also want to consider the nature of the work order and perhaps get the easy tasks out of the way first while saving the more complicated ones for later. If you already have planned and scheduled work orders, the maintenance department should immediately action these.
3. Assign and Schedule Work
Here, you need to create a work schedule. Consider why you have a maintenance backlog in the first place. Is this because of poor planning? Are you understaffed? Do you need help managing your budget?
Whatever the answer, look closely at these factors while developing a new schedule. You want to ensure you clear your backlog while not creating a new one. You’re not likely to do this in one fell swoop, so be patient and set realistic goals.
4. Review Backlog
As we just stated, it will likely take more than one round of work to clear your backlog successfully while not creating another backlog you’ll struggle to manage.
So, once done, take a step back and look at what worked and didn’t in this process. Were your workers stretched thin or under-utilized? Did you come in over or under budget? You might find opportunities to save time and money during your next maintenance cycle, so analyze all your relevant metrics.
One way to do this is by tracking your data using a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). A robust CMMS platform will help you track and analyze your data and generate valuable insights. Here are some other ways a CMMS can help with managing maintenance backlog.
Use a CMMS to Manage Your Maintenance Backlog
Simplifies Maintenance Planning
First, you have hopefully already ditched your hardcopy spreadsheets. Then, with CMMS software, you can simplify your maintenance planning. You can even go a step further to automate your maintenance activities. For example, you can create repeatable digital work orders according to your schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, or otherwise.
This approach helps ensure workers receive notifications about their maintenance tasks on time. Automated maintenance planning also helps prevent backlog due to missed or forgotten work orders. In addition, using a CMMS to organize your work orders helps to avoid duplicate work orders and conflicting schedules, which can also contribute to a backlog.
Helps Streamline Workflows
With a CMMS, you can add work instructions to a work order and create Standard Operating Procedures that guide all your maintenance activities. Doing this ensures that your team carries out maintenance in the best possible way, which helps reduce the need to go back and fix already-addressed problems.
Optimizes Data Management
To adequately address a backlog, you need to clarify it and understand why it happened in the first place. A CMMS can help you store and analyze your data to determine where problems lie. MaintainX CMMS, for example, features a reporting module that empowers you to make data-driven decisions by generating insights from your data.
MaintainX Helps Eliminates Your Maintenance Backlog
Our CMMS helps manufacturing and maintenance teams manage their processes and streamline their workflows. Even better, MaintainX is the first chat work order software, offering real-time communication and connectivity between staff. MaintainX can help you with the following:
- Data Management
- Automated work orders
- Digital SOPs and checklists, and much more.
FAQs
Lekan Olanrewaju
Lekan Olanrewaju is a content writer at MaintainX with years of experience in media and content creation. He has held positions at various media organizations, working with and leading teams at print magazines, digital publications, and television productions.
