Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

If you are like almost all maintenance and reliability professionals, you no doubt believe that the cure for excessive reactive maintenance is a strong dose of Maintenance Planning and Scheduling.  In almost every instance, you’d be correct.  It’s just as likely you have a planner that is doing everything but actually planning.  This would be a planner, but in name only.  You’re frustrated, you’re disappointed, and you’re just wanting this ‘thing’ to get better.  Been there, done that.

It may be that you don’t have a Maintenance Planning and Scheduling function at all, but you know that you need one.  Your focus now is to make a compelling argument to those that talk MONEY, on the need to spend some money to hire and train a Maintenance Planning and Scheduling resource or resources.

Here are a series of seven positional situations that you should answer honestly ‘yes’ to if Maintenance Planning and Scheduling is going to be right for you:

  1. We don’t really plan any maintenance.
  2. What we do is ‘fight’ and argue with production to gain access to equipment.
  3. Our technical knowledge on our equipment is tribal and not institutionalize.
  4. Our planner spends most of their time ‘shagging’ parts for repairs.
  5. We don’t kit parts for planned maintenance.
  6. We have a ‘run and gun’ maintenance execution.
  7. There is no or little standardization to how we execute maintenance.

Look at the following illustration and note the placement of both the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling processes.  This model is the well-known P-F deterioration curve used to symbolize a component’s deterioration.  We’ve superimposed all the maintenance functions onto the P-F curve to demonstrate an approximate timeframe for certain activities.

maintenance planning and scheduling graph

Is your maintenance execution as cut-and-dry, as standardized, and as on-the-money as this illustration?  Is your current execution worthy of world-class consideration?  Be honest.

World-Class levels for maintenance planning and scheduling dictate that to reach this 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, we do our most creative work.  We don’t want creative work.  You don’t want creative work.

We build high-performing maintenance planning and scheduling processes.  We do this by:

  • Assessing the current strengths and opportunities that exist in your maintenance planning and scheduling processes through a very thorough Maintenance Effectiveness Assessment
  • Developing comprehensive strategies to get better quickly, yet pragmatically – measured and metered
  • Differentiating between
    • Planning – the what and how
    • Scheduling – the when, and on the day of execution, the who
  • Formalizing all maintenance planning and scheduling processes through documented and detailed process guides – and train everyone to those process guides
  • Executing those processes, using metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure continuous improvement
  • Working with the storeroom to kit parts for planned work
  • Creating a planner checklist to be used when the planner is ‘walking down the jobs’
  • When and if possible, using reliability calculations to determine when to actually schedule maintenance work (this is typically for mature companies – very high level)
  • Most importantly, creating job plans for your maintenance operations

The planner’s #1 job is to increase the utilization of the maintenance workforce.  The scheduler’s #1 job is to get the work done, on time and on budget.

Maintenance Innovators, Inc. has over thirty-six years of experience building and executing highly effective and efficient maintenance planning and scheduling practices.  Our work is making a difference for a multiple of industries around the world…east to west, north to south.

Call or email now and let us work with you as a valued partner to build a maintenance planning and scheduling practice that delivers the equipment reliability and availability.  Your first step is a call away.