Work Management's goal is to carry out maintenance-related operations in a way that safeguards a company's ability to operate while also striking the correct cost-risk balance for each asset.
The maintenance department must be able to complete approved preventive tasks on time, in full, and according to specifications, and this will be the priority for the most part. However, responding to machinery breakdowns (emergency work) can and will disrupt the best-laid plans, and the overall impact will be determined by how much of what has failed and the business impact of the failures.
Reliability engineers spend a lot of time trying to eliminate the need for emergency and break-in work, and they rely largely on feedback from tradies during these situations. Many hours are also spent attempting to improve the efficiency of work tasks, with the goal of increasing 'Tool Time' and reducing waste (Muda).
There should be no huge backlog to handle if a corporation could engineer their way out of difficult breakdown percentages and have their staff spend nearly all of their time performing strategy-based maintenance with little to no 'Non Tool Time.' The term 'backlog' is a misnomer because if we didn't finish the project last Wednesday, it simply has to be rescheduled, unless of course we've recently developed a time machine.
The rescheduling tasks should be risk assessed and this will determine how far out into the future (the forward log) this task will appear. Rescheduling work is not desirable and we should also be coding the rescheduled jobs by recording why they need to be rescheduled as well as the business impact of rescheduling a task. Reliability engineers would be able to analyse this data, and in some situations, blocking rescheduling of a specific operation might be just as damaging to a company as an equipment failure.