In an ideal world, every work order would be proactive, and we’d never have to worry about our machines when we go home at night. But the reality is that unplanned downtime can, and will, happen, and we’ll always have a backlog of maintenance as we try to catch up. We call this “backlog,” or all the work you have left over that is incomplete.

Given an average workday in a workweek, you can estimate how long it will take your team to work on these tasks. For example: If you have 40 hours per technician in a week, you can divide up your tasks among them. Anything left over grows your backlog. We can’t stress this enough: Everyone, everywhere, has backlog to some degree – but when is it bad thing?

Backlog size can indicate a much bigger problem, and it’s usually a symptom of a larger issue. And, while a long backlog is always a bad thing, a short backlog can be just as bad as you might have too many technicians for your workload or undocumented tasks.

Some other common culprits affecting backlog include:

No cultural focus on proactive work over reactive
A lack of proper skills in your workforce, leading to imbalanced workloads
Improper inventory management

In 2017 we conducted a survey examining the average backlog of manufacturing professionals. To learn more about what we uncovered, tips on how to combat your list of “to do” tasks plus two more key metrics for modern maintenance, check out our free e-book today!

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Metric 1: How Backlog Affects Maintenance

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