In this age of downsizing, organization and staffing are among the most critical issues affecting maintenance. How is the maintenance organization staffed? While companies have tried many different staffing formulas over the years, the only perennially successful one is staffing the maintenance department based on work backlog. A maintenance work backlog is the amount of work currently identified as needing to be performed by the maintenance department. This amount of work is measured in hours. Many have tried to measure backlog by the number of work orders, percentage of production hours, etc., but these measures never work. The only true measure of backlog is based on hours of work to be done. When calculating the backlog, it is necessary not only to know the hours of maintenance work needed, but also to understand current work force capacity.

The formula for calculating backlog is as follows:

For example, a backlog contains 2,800 hours of work that is currently identified. The current work force has ten technicians who each work 40 hours per week plus 8 hours of overtime per week. Total hours worked per week by the technicians, then, is 480 hours. The company also uses two outside contractors for 40 hours each per week another 80 hours. Therefore, the total capacity for the work force is 560 hours. If the 2,800 hours in the backlog is divided by the 560 hours of capacity, this produces a backlog of five weeks. An optimum backlog is considered to be...