The Maintenance Overtime Question Nobody Asks
Every plant tracks overtime. Almost none of them ask the only question that matters: how much of it is structural?
Because there are two completely different things hiding under the same line in the budget, and confusing them costs real money. One is normal and unavoidable. The other is a problem dressed up as a cost, and in most plants it is a six-figure one.
Two kinds of maintenance overtime
Spike overtime is the overtime everyone pictures. A major breakdown, a shutdown that ran long, a customer deadline that moved forward. It is temporary, it is visible, and it has a clear cause. You can point at the event that drove it. This kind of overtime is normal, and trying to engineer it to zero would cost more than it saves.
Structural overtime is different, and it is the one nobody questions. It is the 10, 12, or 15 hours per person per week that show up regardless of what is happening. No single event drives it. It is just there, every week, baked into the roster and expected in the budget. Structural overtime is not a response to a crisis. It is a plant quietly running on more hours than it has capacity for during straight time, and papering over the gap with premium-rate labour, permanently.
Spike overtime is weather. Structural overtime is climate. And the climate is where the money is.
Why most plants never question it
If structural overtime is so expensive, why does it survive review after review? Three reasons, and they reinforce each other.
The team wants it. For a lot of maintenance crews, overtime income is a meaningful part of take-home pay. Reducing it is an uncomfortable conversation, so managers avoid having it, and the hours roll on.
The budget has normalized it. When overtime runs at the same level for two or three years, it stops being a variance. It is simply "what we spend". It does not flag on any report, because nothing is changing. Stability is doing the hiding.
Nobody has measured it as its own number. Most managers can tell you total overtime hours. Very few can tell you the dollar cost of the structural portion as a discrete line, because it is blended into total labour cost and disappears. What you cannot see, you cannot challenge.
What structural overtime actually costs
Let me make it concrete, because the number is usually the thing that wakes people up.
Take a maintenance team of 20 people, averaging 12 hours of overtime each per week, at a loaded overtime premium of $35 an hour:
20 staff x 12 hours x $35 premium x 52 weeks = $436,800 per year.
And that is the premium alone. It is not the total cost of those overtime hours. It is just the extra you pay for the privilege of doing the work after hours instead of inside straight time.
Now the part that matters: in most plants I have assessed, at least half of structural overtime is avoidable. It is not buying you more output. It is compensating for poor schedule compliance, too much reactive work, inefficient use of the straight-time hours you already pay for, or a backlog that never gets controlled. Fix those, and a large chunk of that $436,800 is recoverable, straight to the bottom line, with no capital and no new headcount.
How to start reducing it
You do not cut structural overtime with an edict. You cut it by removing the reasons it exists. Four steps.
1. Separate the structural from the spike
Pull 12 months of overtime data. Strip out the weeks that contained a shutdown or a genuine major event. What is left, week after week, is your structural baseline. If that baseline sits consistently above about 8 hours per person per week, you have a structural problem, not a run of bad luck.
2. Put a dollar figure on it
Apply the arithmetic above to your own numbers and isolate the structural premium as a single line. Then show it to your GM. Most of them have never seen it pulled out and named like that, and the reaction when they do is usually the moment the work actually starts.
3. Find the real causes
Structural overtime almost always traces back to a short list: too much reactive work, weak planning and scheduling, inefficient use of straight time, or a workload that genuinely exceeds capacity. The first three you can fix with discipline. Only the last one might need more people, and you will not know which you are dealing with until you have done the first two steps honestly.
4. Set a realistic target
Do not aim for zero. Aim to cut structural overtime by 20% to 30% over 90 days. That is achievable, it is measurable, and the savings land directly on the bottom line. Hit that, prove it, and then go again.
The bottom line
Overtime is not free productivity. It is expensive labour, and structural overtime in particular is usually masking a problem you could solve for less. The plants that pull ahead are not the ones that work the most hours. They are the ones that stopped paying a premium to hide their capacity and scheduling problems, and fixed the problems instead.
Where to start
If the arithmetic above lands anywhere near your own numbers, it is worth a phone call. Ring 0493 262 725, or start at www.ridgwayresilience.com, where the Schedule Reset is laid out in full: a fixed-price, two-week engagement, delivered remotely, that puts your forward schedule, your labour loading, and what is about to bite in one view. No forms, no funnel, and if the schedule turns out to be tighter than you think, I will say so and we will not start.