PS100: Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling

In this module, we start the real work. After a brief exploration of the role of maintenance in asset-intensive industries, we’ll explore why we need planning & scheduling. We’ll discuss the roles of maintenance planners, schedulers, and supervisors. We’ll cover the increase in productivity and what that means for the bottom line of the business you work for. But we’ll also explore other key benefits of planning & scheduling that are maybe less tangible like workforce motivation and safety.

Module 3 is all about the best practices for how to identify and prioritise work. Fail to get this right and you’ll continue to chase your tail and will not get out of the reactive maintenance model. Most organisations don’t realise how critical this step is. Most managers and supervisors don’t want to spend the time getting this right.

In this module, I will explain why you don’t want to be making that mistake and why putting a lot of effort into creating quality work requests and prioritising them properly is so critical to your success. And in the last lesson, we’ll touch on some key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to measure your success.

Module 4 is all about maintenance planning, why it is important and the 6 Maintenance Planning Principles that underpin a sound maintenance planning process.

We’ll talk quite a lot about best practices, roles, and responsibilities because this is where many organisations go wrong. They burden their maintenance planners with work that should be done by others and in doing so they never reach the productivity improvement they were aiming for.

We’ll also discuss the level of detail that is required in a maintenance work order, what makes a good ‘work pack’ and we’ll touch on common mistakes and some useful KPIs.

This is a step in the planning & scheduling process that is not often talked about, but it’s key to your success. Once the work is planned, all materials are ordered, and purchase orders have gone out for external services you need to keep an eye out on when vendors are available, when materials will arrive at site etc. And when that’s all in place, you need to flag the planned work in your CMMS as ‘Ready for Execution’ as a handover point to the Scheduler.

Module 6 is all about scheduling and your weekly maintenance schedule. We’ll talk about how scheduling is different from planning and why you need both. We’ll discuss 5 basic scheduling principles including why you need to schedule for a Frozen Week. how to build up your Weekly Schedule. And we’ll delve into capacity planning plus we’ll talk about some basic scheduling techniques and concepts. As usual, our last lesson in this module will cover KPIs in this case those KPIs that you can use to drive your scheduling process, for example, Weekly Schedule Compliance.

Module 7 is all about executing the maintenance work that has been planned and scheduled. This is the core of the process and a lot of what we do in planning & scheduling is to drive efficiency in this part of the process. We’ll focus extensively on the role of the maintenance supervisor. We’ll discuss in detail how you need to manage Emergency Work. And we’ll touch on how you should be dealing with Emergent Work, the work you discover whilst doing a job.

Module 8 covers the close out of work. This is where we capture everything that went well and the things that didn’t go too well. We provide feedback to the planner in terms of planning quality, materials etc. and we capture technical history in the CMMS so the reliability engineers can use that information in their continuous improvement programs. We’ll also discuss how this links into your Defect Elimination and Root Cause Analysis processes. The secret to successful planning & scheduling is a continuous improvement loop and that relies on the proper close-out of work and high-quality feedback.

Module 9 is all about making things better and better or in other words: Continuous improvement and how to build that into your business and your work processes. We’ll delve into using KPIs to drive performance and the limits to what KPIs can do for you. We’ll talk about the need to have a ‘process owner’ who conducts annual process ‘audits’ and the value of GEMBA walks. In Lesson 4 of this module, we’ll touch on a contentious subject – measuring wrench time. How to do it, when to do it and when not.