Where technician hours actually go
A technician paid for eight hours delivers rather fewer on the tools. The gap is measurable, largely structural, and almost never measured.
Read the guideIndependent · editorial · no vendors
A schedule is a promise written in labour hours
An independent reference on maintenance operations: building a planned schedule, running work orders that get closed, understanding where technician hours actually go, and holding contractors to a response time that means something. For a commercial example of how workforce time data is presented, see the Monitask website.
35%
a common wrench-time figure before anyone measures it
4
places a technician hour goes that is not the job
30
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Sections
From the asset register to the invoice
Five sections following the sequence a maintenance department actually works in: decide what needs doing and how often, turn that into jobs that get closed, find out where the hours went, and hold the contractors to what was specified. For a wider operational and compliance reference, consult DOE operations and maintenance guidance.
Planned maintenance
Building a schedule that reflects the assets you have, the intervals they need and the hours you can actually supply.
6 guidesWork orders
Raising, prioritising, estimating and closing the individual jobs that the schedule and the reactive queue both produce.
6 guidesTechnician time
Where the hours go: wrench time, travel, waiting for parts, and the honest measurement of all three.
8 guidesContractors
Specifying the work, agreeing a response time that is enforceable, and verifying the hours you are invoiced for.
5 guidesTools
Spreadsheets, maintenance management systems, mobile work orders and time tracking, judged on what they solve for a small team.
5 guidesStart here
Six guides worth reading first
The pieces that most often change how a small department plans its week.
Building a planned schedule you can actually staff
Most planned schedules are arithmetic problems that were never done. The hours required exceed the hours available, and the difference is absorbed silently.
Read the guideEstimating how long a job will take
Every schedule, every quotation and every capacity calculation rests on duration estimates that almost nobody checks against outcomes.
Read the guidePrioritising reactive work without a shouting match
Priority set by the person reporting produces a queue in which everything is urgent. Priority set by rule produces one that can be planned.
Read the guideResponse times that mean something
A four-hour response commitment is worthless without a definition of when the clock starts, what counts as a response, and what happens when it is missed.
Read the guideWhen a spreadsheet stops being enough
A spreadsheet runs a maintenance schedule adequately for longer than vendors suggest. The thresholds that force a change are specific.
Read the guideWritten for departments with no planner
Most maintenance guidance assumes a planning function, a reliability engineer and
a data analyst. Everything here assumes five technicians, a spreadsheet and a week
that is already full.
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