Why Your Work Orders Take Twice as Long as They Should
Pull the last 200 closed corrective work orders out of your CMMS and sort them by elapsed time, open to close. Then look at the labor hours booked on each one.
The gap is usually embarrassing. A job estimated at four hours sat open for nine days; a two-hour seal replacement took three weeks. The hands-on work stayed small while the calendar kept growing.
Most plants blame the crew, the backlog, or production for hanging onto the asset. Trace the delay back to its origin, though, and one cause shows up more than any other: the technician got to the job and the parts weren't there.
Cycle time and wrench time measure different things
Wrench time gets all the attention. Doc Palmer has been saying for decades that the typical crew runs about 35% and best practice is 55%, and that ratio (55 ÷ 35 = 1.57) is the whole business case for planning and scheduling.
Cycle time is the quieter number: elapsed time from the moment a work order is approved to the moment it's closed. Wrench time tells you how a shift was spent. Cycle time tells you how long the plant waited for the fix.
Those two don't move in lockstep. Travel eats 10 to 18% of a typical shift, which hurts wrench time, but it only costs minutes per job. A missing part costs days: the technician walks away, the work order goes back in the backlog, and nothing happens until a box shows up on the receiving dock.
Travel costs you minutes. A missing part costs you the rest of the week.
The CMMS usually hides this. Most sites never use the "waiting on parts" status, so a job stalled on a bearing shows up as plain backlog, indistinguishable from a job nobody's gotten to yet.
That's why parts dominate cycle time even when they're a modest slice of the wrench time pie. Most wrench time studies put waiting on parts at 8 to 12% of the shift, with more hiding under "locating parts, tools and information." Small percentages, huge calendar impact.
The anatomy of a nine-day work order
Day one, the technician pulls the work order, drives to the asset, opens it up, and finds the bearing is a different size than the one in the storeroom. Back to the shop. A parts request goes in.
Day two, the storeroom checks the bin. The CMMS says two on hand; the bin says zero (cycle count accuracy strikes again). Purchasing raises a PO.
Days three through seven, the part is in transit. The job sits in the backlog, and the asset either limps along or stays down.
Day eight, the part arrives, but the crew is already scheduled on something else. Day nine, somebody finally finishes a four-hour job.
Where nine days go on a four-hour work order
Elapsed calendar days, by cause
Illustrative breakdown of elapsed time on a four-hour corrective job when parts weren't kitted. Proportions vary by plant; the ranking rarely does.
Nine days of elapsed time, four hours of actual work. The same job with parts pulled and staged the day before would've closed in two.
Every block in that chart is ordinary friction. The parts block is just bigger than all the others combined.
What a kit actually changes
A kit is simple. Every part, consumable, and special tool for a planned job gets pulled, bagged, labeled with the work order number, and staged where the technician can grab it in one trip. Someone whose job is building kits builds it the day before, or the week before.
The stockout still happens. The wrong part still gets picked. What changes is where and when the surprise lands.
A kit built on Tuesday turns a nine-day work order into a two-day one. Same part, same technician, same job.
With kitting, the surprise lands at the kitting bench on Tuesday, with four days of runway to fix it. Without kitting, the surprise lands at the machine on Saturday night, with production standing behind the technician asking how long.
That's the whole trick: the discovery point moves upstream. The work order stays in planned backlog until materials are confirmed, so the days that used to get charged to "waiting on parts" never touch the open work order at all.
Where the storeroom becomes the bottleneck
Here's the catch. Kitting only works if the storeroom can support it, and most plant storerooms can't.
Inventory accuracy below 90% means the kit builder trusts the wrong number. Min/max levels nobody's reviewed since 2019 mean the part was never there to pull. A storeroom staffed by whoever's free means kits get built when somebody has time, which is never.
While some organizations attempt to implement changes to address their MRO challenges, often these initiatives are delayed and take extended periods of time to see results as the work is piled on top of existing commitments and projects that consume their already busy day.
Another approach is to look toward outsourcing the various MRO function to the experts. SDI specializes in implementing MRO services and solutions. SDI helps companies create an MRO strategy that aligns with your maintenance and reliability strategy. They focus on the key MRO pillars - master data, MRO procurement and supply chain and storeroom and inventory management. SDI’s expertise enables customers to be more productive, competitive, and profitable by helping them become more efficient and reduce the cost of MRO in its entirety.
A connected MRO strategy will increase uptime, optimize inventory, streamline the MRO supply chain, improve work order completion rates and ultimately empower maintenance to perform.
Whoever runs the storeroom, the test is the same: can they hand a technician a complete kit for tomorrow's schedule, today, without anyone making a phone call? If the answer is no, kitting is a policy on paper.
And it only applies to planned work, which is the point. Emergency jobs will always start without a kit. The goal is to shrink that category until it's the exception, and kitting is what makes the planned category worth the planning.
What a kitting and staging program actually requires
In-house or outsourced, the ingredients don't change, and none of them are software.
A planner who puts a bill of materials on every planned work order, with storeroom part numbers, and confirms availability before the job hits the schedule
Inventory accuracy above 95% on the SKUs that show up on work orders most often, verified by cycle counting, with the CMMS and the bin agreeing
A physical staging area labeled by work order number, with a cutoff (kits built by end of day Thursday for next week's schedule, say)
A kit builder whose first job is kitting, with the authority to flag a short kit and push the work order back to the planner
A feedback loop: every short kit gets logged, and the top five reasons get reviewed monthly
That last one matters more than it looks. Short kits are the leading indicator for every stockout you'll have next quarter, and the log is usually the first time anyone notices the same part number coming up three weeks running.
The one number to track
Pick one metric and watch it for 90 days: the percentage of planned work orders that start with a complete kit staged.
Most plants start somewhere between 20 and 40%. Above 80% is where cycle time collapses, because the "waiting on parts" block simply disappears from most jobs.
Measuring it takes one field in the CMMS (kit complete, yes or no) and one person who refuses to release a job without it. The second part is harder than the first, because the first week of enforcing it will shrink the schedule noticeably.
This is also where the "twice as long" in the headline comes from. A planned job with materials in hand runs at something close to its labor estimate. The same job without them runs at the estimate plus whatever the supply chain charges, and the supply chain rarely charges less than a week.
Start with those 200 work orders
Go back to the CMMS export. For every job that took more than three times its labor estimate, write the reason in one of four buckets:
Parts: the technician arrived, and something was missing, wrong, or on order
Permits: lockout, hot work, confined space, or operations wouldn't release the asset
Scheduling: the parts and people were available, but the job kept getting bumped
Scope: the job grew once it was opened up
Count them. If parts win (and they will), you've got your project.
Every technician you hire into a plant without kits is another person standing at the storeroom window.
The crew's fine, and the planner's probably fine too. The job is to get the kit built before the work starts, every time, by someone who owns it. Do that, and the four-hour job starts taking four hours again.