To identify degrading performance of wells or well pump motors, and to set up an optimum maintenance schedule for a particular well, an engineer must evaluate several months of data on well output and operation. The repetitive and tedious procedure of evaluating many months of well data can be automated using an expert system. Ultimately, an expert system should be designed to automatically process monthly well data, identify wells with characteristics that indicate degrading performance, and recommend specific maintenance actions to improve performance. This paper presents the initial steps in the development of the expert system, including discussions of the suitability of the problem for an expert system, knowledge organization in the expert system, the choice of an expert system tool for this task, actual development efforts thus far, and conclusions that can be drawn at this point.