6.2 Work Planning

Maintenance planning should provide a huge bump in our work order completion rates. Yet most companies find that planning simply provides a lot of frustration. Six principles of planning and six principles of scheduling plus a consideration of reactive work help us successfully make planning into a best practice with obviously great results. These principles involve protecting planners to run a Deming cycle to make “better” plans over the years instead of perfect plans now and starting maintenance crews with fully loaded, weekly schedules that they are allowed to break. We can also plan some of the reactive work if we don’t have to be perfect and never tell supervisors to wait. These concepts are at odds with traditional approaches of procedures-driven-maintenance, high schedule compliance, and letting reactive work bypass planning altogether. But they make our companies wildly successful in draining huge outstanding backlogs of proactive work.

Written by a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) with more than three decades of experience, this resource provides proven planning and scheduling strategies that will take any maintenance organization to the next level of performance. The book resolves common industry frustration with planning and reduces the complexity of scheduling in addition to dealing with reactive maintenance. You will find coverage of estimating labor hours, setting the level of plan detail, creating practical weekly and daily schedules, kitting parts, and more, all designed to increase your workforce without hiring. Much of the text applies the timeless management principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Peter F. Drucker. You will learn how you can do more proactive work when your hands are full of reactive work.  Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook covers:   •The business case for the benefit of planning.   •Planning principles.   •Scheduling principles.   •Handling reactive maintenance.   •Planning a work order.   •Creating a weekly schedule.   •Daily scheduling and supervision.   •Parts and planners.   •The computer CMMS in maintenance.   •How planning works with PM, PdM, and projects.   •Controlling planning: the best KPIs KPIs for planning and overall maintenance.   •Shutdown, turnaround, overhaul, and outage management.   •Selling, organizing, analyzing, and auditing planning.           Palmers "Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook" is listed a reference for Module 6 of the PEMAC  Maintenance Management Professionals (MMP) Program.

This article will be discussing the issues and some causes of bad parts.

How well is your MRO Stores system integrated with your maintenance requirements to ensure effective support of your organization’s maintenance efforts?Most of MRO stores efforts are to provide parts and materials to both Operations and Maintenance. For this article, the focus will be upon MRO stores support of Maintenance.

This case study will show how we used an analysis of standard work management metrics and a systematic approach to identify opportunities to improve our plant. We'll provide specific examples of how we developed and implemented the approach and the results we achieved. We'll also describe the fundamental understanding and steps that could be taken to implement a similar approach at any plant, or for any particular metric. Topics will include cultural recognition of KPIs as an improvement tool, not a personnel measurement stick; understanding all the various causes and influences on any particular metric; analysis and categorization of deviations; identifying losses as acute one-offs vs. chronic systemic issues; behavioural vs. procedural issues; understanding change/improvement requirements, what can be directly controlled and what can be only influenced; determining corrective actions; and tracking the resulting improvements. Specific examples will be derived from our site's application of this methodology to schedule compliance, PM/PdM compliance, and emergency work metrics.  

Coordinating all of the maintenance activities within a site can be overwhelming. A schedule is supposed to help reduce the sense of being overwhelmed. But why is it that when trying to pull together a schedule for the next shift, day or week, it always seems to be a mad dash?Having a simple, easy to use scheduling process can reduce the mad dash and enable us to project an image of being in control of our work. This leads to trust with the Operations planning team, creating an integrate schedule.

Reliability engineers in industry are often thrown into the position with very little knowledge about what they’re supposed to do. Or, sometimes, the organization isn’t set up to take advantage of what a reliability engineer can do. Sometimes these engineers have the theoretical knowledge from college but never learned what will be used in the real world. This presentation will address all the basics a new reliability engineer must know. We’ll focus on managing existing equipment and provide an overview of the reliability engineer’s role in new equipment procurement and design. We’ve found that the role of a reliability engineer is not often clear; in fact, many reliability engineers end up doing a lot of work not always related to what they should do.

This webcast will highlight Potash’s extensive implementation of mobile devices to support its business processes. Aligned Mobile Applications are now in use or being implemented at Potash’s Allan, Augusta, Aurora, Geismar, Lanigan, Lima, Rocanville & Trinidad sites. Potash has partnered with Viziya to develop a single integrated mobile app to meet its maintenance and supply chain business requirements, and Postash continues to deploy ‘out of the box’ apps from its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Vendor mobile devices are now a commodity which provide a cost effective way to drive efficiencies. Importantly, apps are available across various platforms; hardware choices do not drive decision making when it comes to selecting the best tools for our business. If you are thinking about implementing a shift to mobile devices on the front lines, this will be a great opportunity to learn from the Potash experience.   Reviewer's comments;  Excellent presentation outlining how Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan has deployed a combination of technologies, enabled on mobile devices (tablets / laptops) integrated fully with their EAM and KPI monitoring systems. Author provides an overview of the situation "before" deployment, through the deployment (which took place over several years) to the "after" or current state. If you want to know what can be done and has been done, this is pretty leading edge stuff and well worth the time to listen.

Jeffboat is a company with a long history.  Originally named the Howard Steamboat Company, Jeffboat is America’s largest inland ship builder and has been manufacturing ships for over 100 years.  Jeffboat has built such famous ships as the Mississippi Queen, the General Jackson showboat and the Casino Aztar riverboat casino. Like most manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has an enormous amount of equipment stretched out over a shipyard that is over a mile in length that is needed to make its boats.  Also like many old-line manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has both equipment and employees who have been there for several decades. Overall, because of the size of the shipyard and age of the equipment, Jeffboat’s maintenance was used to working in reactive mode.  There was no CMMS software in place and equipment was put into numerous Excel spreadsheets.  In addition, it was often hit or miss whether the right parts were in the stores room and finding the right equipment often took maintenance technicians a significant amount of time.  There was no Scheduler/Planner and maintenance procedures were done informally and based on need at that particular moment.When implementing a maintenance management strategy, a critical component is the resistance to change. Whether it is the introduction of new software or a complete overhaul of the maintenance function, the process of change represents disruptive technology (Christenson, …). According to Christenson, most changes are really improvements on something old and the old paradigms can be used. However, there are changes that organizations need to make that disrupt the dominant paradigm, rather than sustaining it. These are disruptive technologies and make the old things less important or obsolete. The problem with these disruptive changes is that people are still applying the old paradigms to the new realities. They are trying, in a sense, to understand the car as nothing more than a carriage without horses.

Based on real-world experience this invaluable guide and reference tells the whole story of maintenance planning from beginning to end in a concise and easy-to-follow manner. Written by well-known professionals this new edition focuses specifically on the preparatory tasks that lead to effective utilization and application of maintenance resources in the interest of the reliability essential to business objectives. It comprehensively examines the job preparation process from job scoping and planning, to determination of material requirements, estimation of labor requirements and job duration, coordination of all involved parties, and job scheduling. And it includes essential metrics for measuring performance of all contributing functions. It is a vital training document for planners, an educational document for those to whom planners are responsible, and a valuable guide for those who interface with the planning and scheduling function and are dependent upon the many contributions of planning and scheduling operational excellence.This is the text book for MMP Module 6.  It is available for purchase through PEMAC, by contacting; pd@pemac.org