5 steps to

manage
maintenance
backlog
Brought to you by: Road to Reliability™ Erik Hupjé
©2022 R2 Reliability Pty Ltd www.roadtoreliabity.com
Clean up your backlog.
Before you start managing your backlog,
you need to resolve work orders that
should no longer be there.
1
Resolve these stagnant work orders before
you start managing your backlog.

Duplicate Too unclear Not important

to work with enough

So old that the Already Not suitable for

issue has already completed but executing through
been resolved is still sitting in the maintenance
the backlog process
You need to take the
backlog that’s left and
2
spread it across different
“buckets of work“.

"PLAN" "PLND" "EXEC"

It’s a concept I teach my students where you
divide the work into—

Plannable backlog
work that still needs to be planned by the planner or
is actively being planned

owned by the planner

Planned backlog
work that has been fully planned as per the status
indicators, but is not yet ready to be executed

Ready backlog
older jobs that are ready to go/ ready to execute

can be done whenever the scheduler can fit them

into the schedule

all material and service constraints have been set

and met
Use statuses that
separate your outstanding
work accordingly in your
3
CMMS.

PLAN For plannable backlog

PLND Planned backlog

EXEC Ready to execute backlog

You need to set up a
regular backlog review
meeting.
4
You want to agree on…

1. the priorities for what needs to be

planned next

2. which work needs to be ready for the

frozen weekly schedule in the following
weeks

3. required actions if your backlog is

continuously growing and moving well
beyond the six to eight-week target.
Have your three buckets
of backlog broken down
into three different
5
views.

The first view is an aging report

The second view is by priority.

The third view shows all your

outstanding work by
equipment or by system.
How do you deal
with your
backlog?
Let us know in the
comments below

Erik Hupjé
Road to Reliability

Brought to you by: Road to Reliability™

©2022 R2 Reliability Pty Ltd