Maintenance Planning And Scheduling

Maintenance planning and scheduling can nearly always improve excessive reactive maintenance. Unfortunately, scheduled maintenance often takes a backseat to urgent production and maintenance issues or other priorities. 

 

Many facilities operate primarily in a reactive mode, responding to breakdowns and problems as they arise. This is expensive in terms of both man-hours and lost production time, and can rack up extra fees for parts and shipping as well. 

 

To reach the high-water mark, your organization should return efforts that 95% of all your maintenance activities are ‘planned’ in advance (there is a definition as to what ‘planned’ means) and that >90% of your maintenance schedule is complied with on time. 

 

Unplanned and unscheduled work is 3-4 times more expensive and unreliable. We don’t do our best work in a crisis. At Maintenance Innovators, Inc., we specialize in helping companies build high-performing maintenance planning and scheduling processes.

 

Answer these questions honestly:

• Do you understand the value of planned maintenance and want to lead your organization in that direction?
• Do you ‘fight’ and argue with production to gain access to equipment?
• Is your technical knowledge of our equipment tribal rather than institutionalized?
• Does your planner spend most of their time ‘shagging’ parts for repairs?
• Have you attempted to kit parts for planned work, but can’t seem to make the process ‘stick’?
• Do you have a ‘run and gun’ maintenance execution?
• Do you have little to no standardization of how you execute maintenance?

 

If you answered “yes” to all or most of these questions, Maintenance Innovators can help. To get you where you need to be, we will start by assessing the current strengths and opportunities that exist in your Maintenance Planning and Scheduling processes through a very thorough Maintenance Effectiveness Assessment. 

 

We then work with you on developing comprehensive strategies to get better quickly, yet pragmatically. We help you to differentiate between planning (the what and how) and scheduling (the when and on the day of execution, who.)

 

Once we formalize all processes through documented and detailed process guides and train everyone to use them, we execute those processes and use metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure continuous improvement.

 

Additionally, we will work with the storeroom to kit parts for planned work and create a planner checklist to be used when the planner is ‘walking down the jobs’. 

 

When and if possible, we will use reliability calculations to determine when to actually schedule maintenance work (this is typically for mature companies) and, most importantly, create job plans for your maintenance operations. The planner’s primary job is to increase the utilization of the maintenance workforce and the scheduler’s primary job is to get the work done, on time and on budget.

 

Maintenance Innovators, Inc. serves clients across the United States and worldwide, with experience in a multitude of industries. For more information about how we can help you reach your maintenance planning and scheduling objectives, contact us at (913) 633-4009.

 

Subscribe to Dr. John’s Maintenance Minute on YouTube for informative videos about reliability and maintenance topics: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtc52hs3OwKQFLvLVW_WVTQ