Scheduling Maintenance work – a practical tool

Scheduling routine maintenance work is difficult and it requires considerable discipline. In our experience improving this vital function often presents the greatest opportunity for improvement.

An essential prerequisite for good scheduling is a well-managed backlog. Managing backlogs and schedules is all about sorting and filtering lists of work, a function in which many maintenance computer systems are very weak. Most systems are so difficult to use for work scheduling that a simple spreadsheet such as MS Excel is usually used.

Once a good backlog is in place and is properly maintained, scheduling is relatively easy and does not require much time.

We have developed a tool using Excel plus an inexpensive add-in that we believe is simple to learn and use and provides an excellent basis for those most basic maintenance-management functions of deciding when a job will be done and who will do it.

This is explained in two videos:

Part 1 is a 40-minute video that covers the prerequisites for good scheduling – putting work orders in a practical format and building a prioritized, easy-to-update backlog. Click here for YouTube – if that is blocked by your firewall, click here to access the video on our Google Drive.

Part 2 shows how to extract work from the backlog to build a graphic weekly work schedule for a typical maintenance crew. Click here for YouTube – if that is blocked by your firewall, click here to access the video on our Google Drive.

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