Planning and Scheduling: Czar Midas Story

Hello Guys,

Trust you enjoyed our last edition and you’re putting the learnings to work in your personal and professional life. Great! That is the essence of this newsletter. To make each and every reader better than they are and become the best at what they do especially in the Maintenance, Operations and Reliability space.

I got a call from a lady today, we worked together years back. In fact, she was the one that taught me Planning and Scheduling and I owe her a great respect for giving me a head start on this unpopular route within the Maintenance Organization. Czar Midas as I will call her was quite knowledgeable and smart at what she does and she did it brilliantly to the company expectation. ?

But I noticed she does not know the reasons behind our deliverables. Does that sound familiar? Let me make it a bit clearer, you may be doing a job without knowing how that contributes to the big picture of your organization. Knowing that reason and going all out every day is what set you apart from the crowd.

Every money, I sit Czar Midas and she’ll walk me through all we have in the system for the day. They are majorly maintenance requests. These come from various people all across our fields who have noticed one defect or the other. We call them requestors. They do their best to describe the problem and point us to the most likely craft that’ll be responsible for the job. It’s also expected that the request is screen by their supervisors.

Our job now is to commence the Planning of the job. This will involve connecting with the requestors and their supervisors to scope the work and we’ll have some basic questions we ask them to narrow down our planning. In some cases, we may have to go to site to checkup how the job looks, what materials will be required and possibly if additional crafts are required to execute the job flawlessly. What about other tools and equipment that may be required to pull the job through successfully. When we have answers to all these, we can go back, finish our planning and set up our work order for approval. Upon approval, we’ll begin the scheduling process. We must always get our schedules ready on or before close of Business on Friday.

Scheduling Process also entail aligning with the execution team to be sure of their readiness to execute the job as per the period of next week. Inside the schedule, you also have Preventive Maintenance that comes in automatic which you need to plan alongside. All these must factor in the availability of the execution personnel so that your schedule will be executable.

You must have noticed the complexity of Maintenance and Scheduling! It wasn’t easy for me to grasp when I moved into that role. I wished they taught us in my engineering class! But no one did. I came across it first time in the industry. But I did the following and it expedited my learnings and professional growth.

1.??????Always Have A Notebook: As popularly said, a blunt pencil is better that the best brain. This just emphasized the fact that you must be putting things down on the go as you learn. This I do day-in, day-out with Czar and it paid off.

?2.??????Read Widely: I checked up for books on Maintenance Planning and Scheduling and coincidentally I got some! Even though, the way it was done in those companies are not exactly the way we do ours, the fundamentals remains the same.

?3.??????Join Up Professional Association: Search for professional association and network in your field of study and leverage the learnings in there. Also contribute what you know and understand

?4.??????Check Available Company Resources and Mentor: There are always great mentors within the company you can learn from. By watching watch they do, asking them questions and perfecting what you do on the go you can always get better.

?5.??????Share What You Know: Be someone who shares your knowledge with others. The truth is that you get better as you share. It is an indirect way of polishing what you know without paying a dime. It also deepen your credibility and professionalism and you’ll become a ‘Go To’ person.

?I used this throughout my Maintenance Planning and Scheduling days and it has remained with me in my career. These stuff works!

?Do you have problem setting up a Planning and Scheduling team? Or you need someone that can energize your current team for better delivery? Why not reach out! I may be able to help out.

?Till we connect again. Enjoy and keep safe.