Also referred to as backlog maintenance or demand maintenance, deferred maintenance is planned or unplanned maintenance that has been postponed. This could be due to a number of reasons, but the most common is usually a lack of available funds. As a result, maintenance projects get deferred to a future budget cycle and the maintenance backlog (opens in new tab) increases.
There are several reasons a company might defer maintenance. Some of the most common causes of deferred maintenance include:
Deferred maintenance is sometimes unavoidable. If a maintenance manager reaches their allocated maintenance budget for the month, it may be necessary to defer maintenance to the next period of available budget if it is low priority. This can be frustrating, but there are ways to stretch the budget and still hit business targets, keep up with preventive maintenance, and avoid staff burnout while on a small maintenance budget.
If you regularly conduct inspections and aren’t finding anything wrong with an asset, you can probably do them less often. Consider conducting scheduled maintenance based on OEM guidelines. Monitor any PMs you change to make sure failure rates don’t increase.
If maintenance is going to be deferred, a prioritization schedule should be created to ensure maintenance needs do not fall through the cracks. Depending on the maintenance required, it may be much more costly to the business in the long-run if issues are not addressed sooner.
Increasing unnecessary risk to the business should also be avoided when deferring maintenance projects. That is, if deferring maintenance increases the health and safety risks to consumers or employees, it should not be deferred and added to the maintenance backlog.
Deferred maintenance is a communal problem for all maintenance managers. Delaying a repair might seem like the smart decision for those with budget restrictions and decaying facilities. However, deferred maintenance can do more damage in the long-run to your business.
While some level of maintenance backlog is acceptable and unavoidable, the appropriate level of maintenance backlog depends on business needs and the level of risk associated with each particular asset. Low-risk assets tolerate longer maintenance backlogs while high-risk assets tolerate shorter maintenance backlogs.
If you’re a maintenance manager facing excessive levels of deferred maintenance, consider these key risks:
Deferred maintenance is part of the existence of every maintenance manager. But there are plenty of ways to better manage your maintenance backlog (opens in new tab) so that it doesn’t end up growing every month. To break the cycle of deferred maintenance, the following approaches are a good way to start:
Leverage the cloud to work together, better in the new connected age of maintenance and asset management.