Your technicians tell you they need more people.
Production wants to know why maintenance cannot keep up.
Your planner says there are 600 work orders sitting in the backlog.
Before you take that number into a meeting and use it to make the case for additional labor, there is a question you need to answer. How much work do those 600 work orders actually represent?
A one-hour work order and a 200-hour work order cannot carry the same weight in your maintenance backlog. Yet that is exactly what happens when an organization measures backlog by counting work orders.
The number may be accurate. It just does not tell you whether your problem is labor capacity, planning readiness, materials, equipment access or work identification.
To make better management decisions, you need to measure backlog in estimated labor hours and crew weeks.