Backlog and the Management of Industrial Asset Maintenance

Do you want to understand about the application of backlog in maintenance? Let’s go!

One of the recurring concerns of a maintenance manager is to know how to calculate and execute a man-hour (Mh) of work, always taking into consideration all the needs of the industrial plant he takes care of.

Besides, it is extremely relevant that those who program the maintenance plan take into consideration the future workload that must be detailed in Service Orders – SO’s and the needs of each service.

This process is a basic premise for calculating or understanding the Backlog in maintenance management.

If you don’t know it yet, the backlog is a very relevant indicator for maintenance management, because it contributes to analysis, decision making, and determines whether the resources needed to provide services are sufficient or not.

When we talk about BACKLOG we are talking about the entire volume of services already duly planned and scheduled to be executed, that is, the open SO’s waiting for service, including the maintenance performed and SO’s not closed in the system.

The manager, when identifying many SO’s open in the system in the planning stage, needs to estimate all the resources and materials, services, and man-hours, and this is one of the most important steps: PLANNING.

At this point, the planner needs to make sure that labor will be available, as well as the unit available to stop.

Imagine in a given month 5 employees go on vacation and this information does not reach the planner? The impact on the Backlog will be inevitable.

Scheduling and inventory impact the backlog

It is also up to the planning to make sure that the materials will be available, that the asset breakdown is already aligned with production, otherwise we will put an uncertainty in the schedule that will impact the Backlog. 

In relation to the detailing of the SO, this is fundamental for the successful execution of the services and proper stratification of the need for Mh.

By controlling this indicator we have the condition to evaluate if we have enough Mh to execute all planned maintenance activities, if we measure by day how many days we will finish the maintenance.

It is interesting to separate them by specialties (Mechanical, Electrical, Inspections, among others) so that we can have a macro vision of all the needs and strategies to act aiming at lower impacts in the execution.

This is one of the main indicators that gives us subsidies for analysis and strategic decision making, besides obviously interfering in other indicators such as availability, reliability, MTTR, and others.

The backlog is an indicator that must be calculated on a monthly basis, or in some cases, depending on the volume, biweekly, so that there is a follow-up of the need x availability of Mh or the number of days required for the executions to be performed and the completed SO’s.

See the example below:

As mentioned the Backlog can be measured in Mh or in days.

DynaPredict and maintenace

The DynaPredict Solution through the DynaSens sensitive inspection module acts directly on the prioritization matrix of the activities mapped in the backlog (list of activities to be performed) by the maintenance team, crossing data on asset criticality, plant, and maintenance plan.

Contact us and learn more about our system of predictive, sensitive, and integrated maintenance.