Summer Maintenance Backlogs? Here’s How to Catch Up
For operations teams, summer can be peak season for maintenance backlogs. Between seasonal demand spikes, reduced crews due to vacations, and slower vendor response times, it’s easy for planned work to pile up. How does this all impact your operations? Unplanned downtime, compliance gaps, and lost production hours.
Why Backlogs Build in the Summer: 3 Reasons
In industrial and manufacturing settings, summer brings a combination of operational and supply chain stressors that can quickly overwhelm maintenance schedules:
- Overlapping priorities: Preventive maintenance windows collide with emergent corrective work, forcing planners to make trade-offs that defer critical tasks. This can cascade into unplanned outages if high-priority assets miss their service intervals. Expert Tip: Use an asset criticality ranking in your CMMS to quickly identify which deferred tasks carry the highest operational risk.
- Extended MRO lead times: Seasonal procurement surges, coupled with supplier capacity constraints and limited raw material availability, push replenishment cycles beyond standard lead times. This creates gaps in critical spares availability and increases mean time to repair (MTTR).
- Workforce availability constraints: Planned vacation schedules, heat-related work limitations, and higher attrition rates in skilled trades reduce the available man-hours to execute work orders, often requiring overtime or contractor mobilization to meet production-critical deadlines.
Common early indicators of a summer backlog include rising average work order age, inflated parts staging queues, and increased overtime as maintenance teams try to bridge the gap.
Why Use the Summer Lull for Maintenance Scheduling?
Not every industrial operation runs at full throttle during summer. For some facilities (especially those tied to seasonal industries or cyclical demand patterns) production demand may temporarily dip. This window offers a strategic opportunity to:
- Advance preventive maintenance ahead of peak season
- Combine multiple jobs/bundle work orders
- Schedule major repairs when production impact is minimal.
- Pre-stage parts/materials and confirm supplier readiness.
Expert Tip: Use downtime windows to perform non-critical (but labor-intensive) maintenance like deep cleans, painting, or insulation repairs, AKA tasks that are disruptive during high-output periods.
Supply Chain’s Role in Clearing the Path
Catching up on maintenance is less about extra hours and more about smarter coordination. Aligning procurement, inventory, and maintenance planning is critical. Strong supplier partnerships and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) programs ensure the right parts are ready when you need them.
Four Ways to Tackle Backlogs Fast
In fast-paced industrial environments, these tactics aren’t standalone fixes. They work best as part of an integrated maintenance recovery plan.
- Prioritize with data. Use your CMMS to rank tasks by equipment criticality so the right jobs get done first.
- Optimize MRO inventory. Use past maintenance data to forecast part needs and avoid stockouts.
- Speed up supply. Put emergency supply contracts in place to fast-track critical orders.
- Deploy cross-functional support. Temporarily shift skilled workers to your most urgent maintenance needs.
By aligning work order prioritization with material availability, labor allocation, and supplier responsiveness, you reduce bottlenecks across the entire maintenance value stream.
Keep Technology Working for You
Before diving into tools, remember that technology is only as valuable as the workflows it supports. In high-demand maintenance environments, integrating digital platforms into your day-to-day operations ensures data continuity from the shop floor to procurement. This eliminates silos, accelerates decision-making, and reduces Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) by enabling condition-based interventions instead of reactive repairs.
- Real-time Inventory Tracking: RFID and IoT sensors provide instant visibility into part location, quantity, and condition across all storage points. This eliminates guesswork, reduces unnecessary orders, and ensures technicians can access parts without delay.
- Predictive Maintenance: By integrating sensor data, historical maintenance logs, and machine learning models, predictive systems can flag components likely to fail soon. This lets you schedule repairs during planned downtime instead of reacting to unexpected breakdowns.
- Mobile-enabled Workflows: Field-ready mobile apps allow technicians to access digital work orders, update job status, upload photos, and request parts directly from the floor. This streamlines communication, shortens administrative lag, and keeps work progressing in real time.
Stop next year’s backlog before it starts.
Here’s what you need to do…
- Spread maintenance across the year with rolling schedules.
- Stock high-failure components ahead of peak season.
- Include seasonal readiness in supplier SLAs.
Expert Tip: Review historical downtime reports each quarter to adjust preventive maintenance frequencies ahead of seasonal peaks.
The lesson learned here is that backlogs aren’t inevitable. With the right mix of supply chain integration, you can turn summer into a season of readiness, not reaction.
How DXP Supply Chain Services Help You Stay Ahead of Backlogs
DXP’s Integrated Supply Services combine Storeroom & Inventory Management, Procurement Management, and MRO Analytics, all backed by our SmartSolutions® supply chain management approach. Our decades of industry experience have shaped standardized programs that are fully adaptable to each client’s unique operational challenges. Our supply chain services keep your operation running at peak performance year-round.
