All right. welcome to lesson two of module four about the Principles of Maintenance Planning. Although this will be a fairly long lesson, we actually only have a single objective, and that is for you to get to know and understand the six principles of maintenance planning. These principles outline what your organisation must ensure happens in order to achieve an effective maintenance planning process. If you fail to implement these principles, your planning process will not deliver the results that you need, your planning process will fail.
00:42
Now, the planning principles that we’re going to talk through in this lesson are very much based on the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook written by Doc Palmer. And that is probably the closest thing we have to the industry standard around maintenance planning and scheduling. I would strongly recommend that you get a copy if you haven’t got it yet. It’s a great reference book. That said, it’s not a quick read with close to 900 pages.
01:06
And to be clear, what I teach in this lesson about maintenance planning principles is aligned to what Doc Palmer writes, but there are some differences. I have made some changes to the content if you read the book. Those changes are based on my own experience from the last 20+ years. All right. So let’s get started and explore these six principles of maintenance planning. Let’s go straight into the first principle which is that your planner needs to focus on future work.
01:37
And what this principle tells us is that planners don’t work for the current week, they work for future weeks. They should always be looking at the work ahead of us. Because if your future work is not properly planned and prepared, your maintenance crew will experience the waste and delays we talked about earlier.
01:56
This means that you do not allow your planner to plan emergency work or emergent work. Those jobs are the domain of the maintenance supervisor, and that’s something we’ll discuss later. You also don’t want your maintenance planners chasing materials for work in progress. You don’t want them to be scheduling routine activities, or acting as a relief supervisor, or to become multipurpose in any other way. You want your planners to purely focus on maintenance planning.
02:28
So if you find your planner being asked to do any of these kind of tasks in support of the current week, then you know you are violating these planning principles. And you can rest assure that the efficiency gains you had hoped to achieve from implementing planning and scheduling will simply never materialise or the gains that you have made will evaporate over time.
02:48
I have seen this over and over where organisations allow planners to work in support of the current week, where managers don’t enforce these planning principles. And then eventually, the maintenance planning functions soon start to fall apart and people wonder why they’re not getting the productivity that they should be getting.
03:06
The second maintenance planning principle is to keep your planners in a separate group. This is so your planners can actually focus on future work. When it comes to developing your maintenance organisation, you want to make sure you have your planners and schedulers sit outside the execution crew. Remember, planners focus on future work. But the execution crew, your technicians and their supervisor, they focus on current work, they work for the current week. And putting these two groups too close together will mean that sooner or later the execution crew is going to drag the planners closer to them and ask for support.
03:43
Now, that likely begins with just some simple technical questions. This could be one of those have-you-got-amoment type of questions. But if you’re not careful, eventually, you will see your planners help with emergency work, finding spares, covering as relief supervisor, et cetera, and then you erode the efficiency gains that you’re aiming to achieve with maintenance planning.
04:02
You see, over time, your planner will become one of the most knowledgeable people in the organisation when it comes to your equipment, how to diagnose problems, how to repair problems, where to find documentation or drawings, where and how to find spares in your CMMS. And so technicians, supervisors, operators, and many others will be tempted to ask your planner for help because it’s just so much easier to ask them the question than try and find it out themselves.
04:28
So unless you protect your planner from all these haveyou-got-a-minute questions and requests, your planner is going to lose a lot of time and the focus of the future work and your efficiency will be undermined.
04:40
The third maintenance planning principle is to ensure you manage job history and equipment data. Now, there are two parts to this planning principle.
04:47
The first is job history, which means we record what equipment failed, why it failed, how the job went, and what should be improved next time around. Recording job history needs to be done in cooperation between the maintenance technicians and the maintenance planner. You want your maintenance technicians and their supervisors to be accountable for the quality of the history they enter into your CMMS.
05:09
Or the planner reviews the job history, identify improvements, and make sure the job is done more efficiently next time around. Now, be careful, your planner is not a reliability engineer. Don’t use your planner to optimise your PM strategy. Don’t use your planner to do root cause analysis. Your planner should be looking at the history to identify how the job plan can be improved.
05:33
Now, we’re going to talk a lot more about capturing job history and reviewing and improving performance later in the course in module eight.
05:40
The second part of this planning principle is around managing equipment data. Managing equipment data is key to the success of your planner and your planning process. Let’s have a look at that in a little bit more detail.
05:52
The first point I want to make is that your planner needs to be made responsible for establishing and maintaining equipment files. That’s not a common practice, especially in larger organisations. But, as you will see, the planner has the most to gain or lose in your maintenance team if equipment files are not established or not accurate. And therefore, as a minimum, you want your planner to be the focal point within your maintenance organisation. for equipment data and your equipment files.
Now, those equipment files would include up-to-date copies of equipment data sheets, drawings, say, general arrangement drawings, or PIN IDs, single line diagrams, other electrical drawings, cause and effects charts, instrument loop diagrams, whatever is needed to maintain the equipment including equipment installation, operating manuals.
06:37
OEM manuals often include useful content for maintenance procedures and step by step guides for troubleshooting and diagnosing problems. So you want to make sure you can find them. Another important data set to maintain would be spare parts data, including, say, a bill of materials complete with all part numbers and descriptions. And ideally, over time, your planner would build up a set of pictures of the equipment at various stages of being maintained or overhauled.
07:03
Now, maybe you have these equipment files in hard copies or electronic copies in corporate databases it doesn’t really matter what shape or form it takes. You want to make sure your planner starts to build up this library of equipment files.
And you want to make sure that they are high quality and accurate. Because the whole point of building a library of equipment files is to use it whenever a job is being planned. We update and improve it every time a job is executed, or when changes are made to the equipment. And then we reuse that data when the next job comes along and we’re planning it once again. Having all this information available is going to save your planner a lot of time.
07:42
The concept is simple: Find it once, use it many times. Again, it’s in a continuous improvement loop. You’re not going to get this complete and perfect first time around, but just start and make it better and better over time. Remember, maintenance is repetitive by definition. That means your planner will need to plan the same jobs again and again. Sure, there will be changes between these jobs because conditions in your plant will maybe have changed, but these changes are often quite minor and the majority of information can be reused from previous jobs.
08:15
So you want your planner to plan forever instead of forever planning. And to help with this, you want to make sure your planner establishes that library and saves work packs in the library for reuse, save equipment files in the library so they can be referred over and over again. Save corrective job plans in a library so they can be used again. Ideally, you have those corrective job plans as a library in your CMMS and you want to also update and improve your PM plans and save them in your library or your CMMS.
08:46
Doing this will save a lot of time and make your planner a lot more productive. But most importantly, having all this information and knowledge stored means that, if your planner ever moves onto a new role, is promoted or simply leaves the company, you still have all that knowledge and experience that has been built up neatly stored away in that library. It is not walking out of the door with the planner.
09:10
The fourth planning principle is that your job estimates should be based on experience. You want to avoid complex job estimates using estimating norms or some kind of job estimating tool. Instead, this planning principle tells you that you want to rely on the experience of your maintenance planner. Now, let me explain why.
09:28
The first point is that, relatively speaking, maintenance jobs are short duration. We’re not talking days or weeks, they’re typically hours. And that means if we’re off by a couple hours on the estimate, we immediately have a high variation in the duration. But the impact is only a few hours. Trying to put a lot of signs and effort to get a more accurate job estimate is probably not worth it if the job durations are relatively short.
9:54
The second important point is that maintenance jobs have a lot of variability. That’s just the nature of doing maintenance. Doing a job one day could easily take a few hours longer than the other day if there are issues with access, or if your crew struggles to loosen a set of fasteners, or weather conditions are really, really bad. It’s very hard to predict these natural variations.
10:17
And that brings me to the last point, and that is maintenance is not repeatable assembly-line type of work where we do things millions of times. When it comes to assembly line work, we have almost 0% variation between task duration estimates and actuals. But with individual maintenance plans and maintenance jobs, that variation can often be 50% and maybe even 100% or more at least on smaller jobs. But once we take the whole group of individual maintenance jobs, and put them together, some will go over and some will go under, and that variation then evens out to maybe plus or minus 10%, or plus or minus 30% over the whole group of work, which is a lot more manageable, a lot more acceptable.
11:01
The bottom line of all this is that maintenance jobs by their nature have a lot of variation and trying to put a lot of effort and science to create very accurate job duration estimates is simply not worth the effort. It’s going to be a waste of your planner’s time. So instead, rely on the experience and knowledge of your planners and use continuous improvement to get better estimates over time.
11:23
And understand that the variation from individual jobs becomes quite manageable over bigger group of jobs, which is actually one of the reasons we schedule for a week and not for a day. But that is something we’ll discuss more in module six on scheduling. Now, of course, the quality and accuracy of your job estimates depend on how experienced your job planner is and how many feedback cycles you’ve been through on those jobs. But remember, even with a job that has been planned to near perfection with many feedback cycles, sometimes things still go wrong. Another failure could be identified, a part may fail, a tool may fail, and that can easily throw off the estimate by 50% or 100%.
12:02
And that’s why in the end, this process really works best if you have a highly experienced and competent maintenance planner. Someone with a large amount of trade knowledge and actual hands-on experience. Someone who knows how to do the job that he or she is planning. Someone who knows how long that job would normally take. Someone with good organisational skills and good data skills. Someone who can put estimates together and compare them with actual durations and then improve the estimates over time. Your planner also needs to be someone with good communication skills so that the flow of information is smooth between the planner and the execution crew.
12:39
All right. The fifth planning principle that I’ll talk about is that you must recognise the skill of your crew. Now, that does not just mean that you need to know how experienced your crew is, but you also need to know their strengths and their weaknesses. Therefore, how much detail and information you need to provide to the crew so they can complete the jobs that are being planned successfully.
13:01
In many organisations, you typically have a mix of experience levels in your crew. You have some very experienced personnel who’ve been on the job for many, many years and you’ll have technicians who may only have just started. In fact, you may even have some apprentices who are still learning on the job.
13:17
So how do you decide what the skill of your crew is? How do you decide what level of detail must go into your job plans? A general rule of thumb I recommend is that you plan your jobs as if the work is going to be done by competent technician that is new to your plant.
13:35
The benefit of this approach is that you’re not telling your technicians what they already should know based on their trade knowledge. So you’re not going to be telling them in your job plan how to, say, calibrate an instrument because a competent instrument technician would already know that. But instead, you will include in your job plan the range and set points of that instrument because no matter how experienced your technician is, he or she would not know those settings off the top of their head and they would have to look them up.
14:03
Another example would be the torque values for hold down bolts. We do need to include the actual torque value, but you would not tell a mechanical technician how to torque bolts up. That would be assumed knowledge.
14:16
Now, remember that we said that planning is the what and the how of a job. Well, when it comes to recognising the skill of the crew is important to realise that the what has to come before the how. Your planner first needs to be very clear about what needs to be done before defining the how. And that is especially important when you’re still in the early phases of planning and scheduling process and you may not have complete job plans in place.
14:43
So before you spend a lot of time on the how of certain jobs, make sure all your jobs have at least a very clear and complete “what”. What needs to be done? So don’t spend all your time planning a single job or a few job to perfection. Instead, you get as many jobs as possible to a reasonable quality and completeness as soon as possible. Defining the what and only then start looking at the how. Now, when it comes to the how of the job, realise that the way a job gets executed should be defined by your planner.
15:16
But once the job is in the frozen week, the how of the job is now owned by the execution crew. So you want to make sure your planner focuses on the really important parts of the how, details that may not be known by the crew irrespective of how much experience they have, or steps that are so important that if the crew did not follow them exactly could lead to injury or equipment damage.
15:37
And then when those elements are in place for all jobs, then it may become the time to add additional steps or additional detail to the how of all the other jobs. And that will then help over time your newer, less experienced technicians. So first, make sure you address the what for all your jobs, and then start working on the how.
16:02
Planning principle six is that you must act on feedback. Now, although this is the last planning principle, it’s possibly actually the most important, and here’s why.
16:12
As we already talked about, maintenance is really all about continuous improvement and you cannot continuously improve if you: A. Don’t get feedback. And B. If you don’t act on the feedback. Not acting on feedback is probably the quickest way to destroy a continuous improvement cycle. You see, once technicians discover that the feedback gave on job plans or equipment history that that feedback is not being used, they will very quickly stop providing it. And restarting that feedback loop can be very hard. So make sure you act on the feedback you get. You see, planning is not a linear process. You don’t just plan the work, do the work and then it’s finished. Remember, maintenance repeats itself. Maintenance is repetitive and so planning is a cycle of continuous improvement.
16:56
It is the cycle of plan, do, check, act. A cycle where we plan the work, do the work, get feedback on the plan and how the work actually went, and then we update our plans so that the work gets done more efficiently, more effectively next time around. This means that as we do our jobs over and over and over again, we should be updating our plans over and over and over again. And that is how we are going to be improving our performance. Every time we do a job, we should do it just a little bit better a little bit better, and a little bit better. That is what planning is all about, continuous improvement.
17:33
All right. That brings me to the end of this lesson. The objective of this lesson was really quite simple. That was for you to get to know and fully understand the six principles of maintenance planning, which in summary were: Focus on Future Work, Have your Planners in a Separate Organisational Group, Make sure your planners maintain a library of equipment data and job history, Develop job duration estimates based on experience, Plan whilst recognising the skill of your crew, and last, Act on Feedback and realise that planning is a cycle of continuous improvement.
18:05
Now, to be honest, knowing and understanding these principles is a good start, a very important start. But things don’t change until you consistently apply these principles in practice. And that is something we’ll talk about in module ten, which is dedicated to how we implement planning and scheduling in your organisation. But until then, make sure you truly understand these principles and start looking at how well your organisation actually adheres to these principles, which by the way, is actually your next assignment.
