It has become commonly accepted that maintenance represents a significant portion of the cost of doing business or providing a service. The portion of the cost that maintenance represents will continue to increase as the various forms of automation increase. It therefore behooves us to make optimum use of that resource called maintenance.

Planning and scheduling of maintenance is one of the ways of optimizing the use of this resource. Normally, however, one of the problems is the amount of clerical work, or “paper shuffling,” associated with such planning and scheduling. Computerization, if properly conceived, can minimize this problem.

Computerization can provide backlog information for various types of work; availability of materials; costs by job, facility, or type of work, and so on, easily. It can increase effectiveness of planning, scheduling, and cost tracking by as much as 50 percent. In addition, it can frequently provide types of information not normally available, at no additional cost.