Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Tips
Practical Planning
Planner Roles and Responsibilities
The role of the planner is essential in reducing downtime and maximizing the value of Preventive Maintenance, Essential Care and Condition Monitoring. The planner must have the necessary technical skills and equipment knowledge to plan work.
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The planning process should contain all the necessary tasks or actions that are required to implement and train on the planning process. The roles and responsibilities should then be added to the job description for the planner.
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For planners to be successful and to communicate the important role of the planner within your organization, develop a work management business process that includes planning and the roles and responsibilities of the planner.
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The planners need to be in an environment conducive to planning.? They should be close enough to the floor to scope out jobs but insulated enough that operations or other maintenance team members aren’t dropping by with work requests. The planner should never work on something that happens today, only tomorrow and forward. Having them act as a fill-in supervisors or purchasers takes time away from their primary function.
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A maintenance planner should not:
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Review and communicate the planning process with engineers and other plant or mill roles that perform planning to ensure consistency in the planning process. Planning processes can be audited by the planner’s supervision to identify areas of opportunities or gaps in the overall process.
Download a small sample from our planning and scheduling workflow.
Develop Standard Job Plans
Did you know that within industry, over 50% of corrective work is repetitive? What does this mean?
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Over the course of the year or several years, it is a guarantee that you as a planner will see the same work order again. A way to add efficiency in the planning process is to develop standard job plans.
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A standard job plan is a detailed, planned work order package using a standardized template. Procedures, estimates, best practices, industry standards, and other details will normally be more detailed than one-time work orders.
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Typically, standard job plans are attached to the equipment they apply to and are easily accessible. Developing standard job plans has many benefits. As mentioned, it is the reduction of the planning time and effort. They capture the expertise and knowledge of people who have done the work before. Over time, they improve through the process of continuous improvement with the feedback provided by technicians. Lastly, standard job plans can be used for training new hires.
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Organize a cross-functional team to develop a standardized template to capture step-by-step instructions, referencing photos and technical specifications. A great goal for a planner in your organization is to build a continuous library of standard job plans. Explore your CMMS functionality to properly attach them to equipment or create a shared drive. Follow a formal nomenclature or naming process so they can be retrieved quickly.
Spotlight on Scheduling
What is Effective Scheduling?
Effective scheduling…
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A frequent question is Who should schedule the work? What are the necessary skills to schedule work? The process of creating a daily, weekly or shutdown work schedule requires considerable time, skills and effort, and these schedules must be completed and communicated before established deadlines in advance of work the being executed.
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Scheduling Skills and Attributes
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Large organizations may have the position of "Maintenance Scheduler," When we use the term "Scheduler,” this refers to the position with scheduling responsibilities, and the options include the Maintenance Scheduler, OMC, Maintenance Planner or Maintenance Supervisor. This assignment of “scheduler is dependent on the size of the organization and the complexity of the schedule.
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For example, developing the weekly schedule may be the responsibility of the Planner, with input from the OMC’s and or an Operations Representative, Engineers and Maintenance Supervisors. In this case, the Planners are not choosing the work orders or PMs to schedule, they are merely creating the weekly schedule based on input from all the necessary stakeholders and the Maintenance Supervisors are providing the Planners their crew availability.
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Daily schedules are the responsibility of the Maintenance Supervisors alone or with some assistance from the Planner, and major shutdown schedules may be produced by the Turnaround or Shutdown Manager, which is a common position in large operations, with input from Supervisors and Planners.
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It is important to remember though, that while a Planner may have other duties, such as scheduling most of a Planner's time should be spent preparing detailed work plans. The assigned responsibility of scheduling can be a monumental task for organizations that are highly reactive or don’t have support from operations. It is up to management to ensure that planners have adequate time to plan.
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To ensure that there is a strong commitment to follow the schedules that are developed, there must be very close and cooperative communication among Schedulers, Planners, Maintenance Supervisors, OMCs, Operating Supervisors, Engineers, and Storeroom personnel.
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Keep in mind that characteristics of a good schedules are that they must be meaningful and practical for Tradespeople, Operators, and all of the other positions that we’ve just mentioned. In addition, their form/format must be easily interpreted. As a result, a graphical layout is strongly preferred since it is much easier to grasp.
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To have effective weekly schedules ensure that scheduling responsibility is assigned to a position that has the necessary time, skills, and attributes to develop the schedule with input and support from Operations, Maintenance, Engineering and Purchasing.
Scheduling in a Reliability Partnership
What does it mean to schedule in a reliability partnership?
Consider the various dynamics and requirements that all must be taken into account. The changes in seasons, last minute rush orders, changes in customer demand and quality requirements, test runs, new product development and evolution, formulation changes, shift changeovers and product changeovers. The completion of preventive maintenance at the right time. Will the parts be here on time as required? Will we schedule overtime on a certain work order if warranted? Are we keeping the customer in mind? Are we aligned on logistics and priorities?
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Scheduling in a Reliability Partnership
1) Maintenance schedules should be tailored to the operation’s needs.
2) Required maintenance still needs to be done.
3) The strategy for scheduling maintenance must be agreed upon by the operating partners.
To balance these, we must all be on the same page, in other words working in a Production Partnership, agreeing on the same approach and processes. Optimizing work means that maintenance schedules should be tailored to the operation’s needs, while necessary maintenance still needs to be done. So, the strategy for scheduling maintenance must be agreed upon by the operating partners.
Realizing, once again, that scheduling is complex, difficult, and absolutely necessary - all at the same time. The same kind of principles that support good planning also support good scheduling. In planning it is helpful for us to categorize work steps in three phases: before, during, and after.? In scheduling, a similar thought process applies.
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Principles that we apply to schedules - all work is to have a defined starting and finishing time, and personnel names assigned. We don’t have infinite resources available to us, so we will match the work completion time requirements to our available resources, to arrive at a workable sequence and timing. We schedule the highest priority work first. We also allocate scarce resources first; some work requires special skills or equipment, while other work can be done by any number of tradespersons.
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We don’t schedule work that isn’t planned and acknowledge that some work doesn’t have to be planned, for example small maintenance jobs don’t justify the preparation of formal work packages, and to provide good response should not follow the formal work scheduling procedures.
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In a weekly, daily or shutdown schedule…
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The "heads and tails" of work is to be taken into account, they are always places to look for opportunities. A schedule is a supervisor’s most useful tool, it ensures that work gets done when it’s supposed to be done.
Examples of what we mean by the “Heads” of work include preparing the tools, transporting tools, equipment, parts, and materials, organizing the workplace, reading and understanding the work package and the job, understanding and mitigating the work risks. The “Tails” are such things as workplace cleanup, cleaning and returning tools to their origin, and disposing of parts and material. We’ll come back to this topic in the work execution videos.
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Planning and Scheduling processes must support the Production Plan to ensure it is achieved. We must keep this in mind at all times while schedules are developed within our reliability partnership, for maximum benefit to the organization, so market and process considerations may dictate a maintenance schedule which reduces maintenance effectiveness but maximizes the organization’s benefits.
Work Management Planning and Scheduling Training
MAY 21-22 - REGISTER TODAY
Raleigh NC and Online
Get your workload under control.
Effective Planning and Scheduling is a key to improving reliability and maintenance performance.?This course delivers the fundamental best practices and tools for planning and scheduling of maintenance work.
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Results of Effective Maintenance Planning and Scheduling:
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You will learn:
You’ll receive IDCON’s “Maintenance Planning and Scheduling” book with your course registration, a $99 value.
Start your RMIC? certification journey with UT Knoxville and IDCON. As an approved provider 3 of our courses satisfies a portion of the certification. Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee
Accomplishments in Loss Reduction and Efficiency Improvement Proven expertise in identifying and mitigating operational losses, optimizing manufacturing processes, enhancing maintenance practices
6 个月Great post! Maintenance planning and scheduling are essential for ensuring the smooth operation of any facility. By following these tips, businesses can reduce downtime, improve productivity, and extend the lifespan of their equipment.
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6 个月Thanks for sharing these tips on Planning and scheduling. This is the foundation for a rock solid Maintenance Management System. Without planing and scheduling you are leaving lots of money and value on the table. Need and experienced advisor of over three decades for Maintenance constancy? Reach out on email: [email protected] or LinkedIn DM.