Practical Maintenance Planning Tips

Leslie Skelly, Senior Consultant, IDCON INC

Tip #1: Hire the Right Person as the Maintenance Planner

As a consultant, I'm often asked, “What are a few practical tips to improve planning?”

We all know the struggles in industry to hire and retain talent.

The planner role may be the most valuable position to the organization in terms of maintenance costs, efficiency, and effectiveness. The position of planner does require some fundamental skills, while other skills that are needed can be taught and acquired.?

Ensure your organization is hiring the right person for the planner role. Most often planners come from trade experience or have great technical knowledge. What really separates a good planner from a great planner are good communication, listening, and problem-solving skills.

The planner should be well-organized, detail oriented, focused, and able to plan and prepare work independently. They should also be proficient in the CMMS and other computer applications. Be patient.

Decide and differentiate between what skills, attributes, abilities, and values that can be acquired through training or are innate within the individual.

Tip #2: Backlog Management in Planning

Do you know how much time and effort a planner spends each day sorting through backlogs that are not clean and organized? Just ask your planner.

Backlog management is the backbone of maintenance management. If we are not managing our backlog, then we are not managing maintenance.

Your organization's backlog must be clean, organized, and well managed. This will eliminate the constant scrolling, validation, and sorting of work orders by planners when they are selecting work orders to be planned and scheduled.

In my years of coaching and mentoring planners, it's painful to watch planners scroll through pages of work orders that have been executed and not closed out, duplicate work orders, and/or work orders that are older than six months or even a year or two.

Tip #3: Planning Prioritization Meetings

How do your planners know which work orders to plan? This seems like an obvious question, but in all regards, is operations and engineering assisting with identification of work orders to be planned?

Every week, a planning prioritization meeting with representation from operations should be held. This meeting is usually conducted on Tuesday mornings with the OMC or Operations Maintenance Representative, Maintenance Supervisors, Planner, and optional attendees, such as the Reliability or Process Engineers and/or any other role that wants work to be planned so it can be scheduled on future week's schedules.

Want to know more about maintenance and reliability roles? Check out this video series .?

The key to successful planning prioritization meetings is that participants come prepared with a list or a backlog sort of work hours for the planners to plan.?

As asset owners, Operations’ role is to assist with identifying high priority work, communicate, and coordinate equipment downtimes, production plans, and needs. This also eliminates reactive planning. This is when work orders are identified this week for planning and then scheduled for the following week.

Planners then don't have the adequate time to perform the necessary field job scoping or plan the work order in detail. If we leave this task to planners, they might not be planning the right work at the right time.

Assess Your Technical Database - And Get a Free Phone Consultation!

With a poor technical database planners spend more time looking for parts than field scoping jobs. Crews and forced to make their own arrangements for special tools and permits. Work consistently takes longer than it should.?To function well, the technical database must be accurate, accessible, and applied.?

Assessing your technical database can be a challenge.?The information is usually spread across different departments so no single person has the full picture.?Knowing questions that will uncover the current state of your technical database also presents a hurdle.?

To help you overcome these obstacles,?IDCON INC ?has developed a three-part survey.?The survey will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of your technical database and its impact on your work management system.??

Take the survey here:??https://lnkd.in/gFWptfWJ

While the benefits of excellent work management are well understood, the impact of the technical database is overlooked.?The technical database is often considered an unnecessary expense with little thought given to its content or organization.?

However, a poor technical database is a root cause of poor planning and inefficient work execution.?In the chemical, pulp and paper, food, and beverage manufacturing, and mining industries, improving the technical database represents a huge opportunity to fundamentally improve?maintenance productivity.

Maintenance Planner Training – Get Your Maintenance Workload Under Control