What is Maintenance Planning & Scheduling

Hi there and welcome to lesson two of module two. In this lesson we’ll delve into the details of what planning and scheduling really is and at the end of this lesson I want you to take away the following three key points.

First, I want you to really know the basic elements that will make up any planning and scheduling process. No matter what company you work for, which industry, if it’s an effective maintenance planning and scheduling process, these basic steps will be in it.

Secondly, I want to make sure you really understand the difference between planning and scheduling. This is an area that is often misunderstood, but unless you truly understand the difference between planning and scheduling, you’ll never be able to really get the benefits and the maximum return that planning and scheduling can bring.

And the last key point that we’ll talk about in this lesson is that planning and scheduling is a process, it’s a continuous process that repeats itself again and again and again. And that is something that we really need to understand so that we can use it to our advantage as we progress through this course.

01:14

This is Alex. He’s a maintenance supervisor in a large industrial plant. Every day Alex struggles with a large amount of maintenance work and many urgent repairs. His crew just don’t have enough time to get all the work done. Too often work stops because a part is missing or because the crew are unsure how to complete a task. Alex is worried about the growing backlog of work. Repairs are not getting done on time leading to equipment failures that could have been prevented. Alex is overwhelmed and worried that one of these days things could go terribly wrong in his plant. Luckily for Alex, a new maintenance manager has just started at the plant. When Alex has a chat with Anna about the state of the plant, Anna explains that better maintenance planning and scheduling will help solve many of Alex’s problems. That’s because planning and scheduling provides everybody with the right tools, materials, and work instructions to do the right work at the right time.

02:14

Here’s how it works. While working in the plant, Jack notices a pump nearby that makes a strange noise and seems to be running hot. Jack raises a work request in the CMMS what, when, where, the likely causes, any actions and risks involved. The following morning Jack’s work request is reviewed to make sure it’s clear and complete. The work request is prioritised and approved. Charlie, the maintenance planner receives the approved work request and starts planning the job. He visits the job site to diagnose the problem with the pump and checks what materials, tools and resources are required to complete the job. Charlie documents everything in the work order, materials are ordered and when they arrive on site, Charlie makes sure they are correct before marking the job as ready for execution in the CMMS. That is the sign for Jenny, the scheduler that she can include the job in the schedule.

03:13

Jenny takes all work orders that are ready to execute and based on their assigned priorities creates a draft weekly schedule. Jenny groups work that needs to be done on the same equipment or is in the same area of the plant. All in an effort to maximise crew efficiency. Once the draft schedule is ready, it’s discussed during the weekly schedule review meeting where operations and maintenance jointly agree on what work will be done next week. Once the schedule is agreed. It acts as a binding contract for everyone. Jenny issues the weekly schedule and Alex as the supervisor hands out the work to his crew. As Jack completes his work, he keeps a daily record of the time he spends on the job and provides detailed technical feedback once the job is complete. That information is used to analyse and improve equipment performance, but also to improve the planning and scheduling process.

04:08

Over time Alex notices that his crew is getting more work done thanks to the good job plans and a clear schedule. As more work is done, the backlog slowly melts. There are less urgent priorities. Both Jack and Alex notice that it’s becoming a better place to work. Safety improves, reliability goes up and so does production. Alex wonders what they could improve next. Now, I want you to just pause the lesson right here and reflect on what you’ve seen in the video. Ask yourself what your current practices are in your organisation. And after that, head on over to the student-only forum and document and share what you have seen in the video versus what you actually do in your organisation. Share what you see are the opportunities to improve, share what you think are your current strengths and what are your current weaknesses.

05:00

All right. Now before I go any further, I want to say a few things about terminology. In this course, I’m going to talk about maintenance planning and scheduling, a lot. I mean, it’s the title of the course, right? And when I talk about maintenance planning and scheduling, what I mean is the end to end process of maintenance work being identified all the way through to the various steps with being closed out and reviewed for improvement. Now different people in industry and in different industries may use different phrases, different terminology. Sometimes, they use the word “Work Management” for this and others are often referred to maintenance planning and scheduling as “Maintenance Execution”, or just “Planning and Scheduling”. In essence, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the same thing. I just want you to realise that in each of these instances we’re using different terminology, but we’re really still talking about the end to end process of maintenance work being identified, being planned, being scheduled, executed, closed out, reviewed for improved performance. And it’s not just about the planning and just scheduling steps. It is about the end to end process.

Video 2

Now, there are many variations of the basic planning and scheduling process being used around the world in different companies, different industries. And each of them will have their own unique approaches to planning and scheduling processes. They are allslightly different, but in all cases, an effective maintenance planning and scheduling process will always boil down to the same basic six steps. And the first step is to identify and prioritise the maintenance work. We then plan that work, schedule it, followed by actually doing it, or executing the work, properly closing it out and then the final step in the process to actually review our performance with a view to improving it. So no matter what industry you’re in, no matter what organisation you work for, a good and effective maintenance planning and scheduling process will always contain those six basic steps.

00:50

Now, in reality the work flow is not as simple as that. There are some intermediate steps, but we’ll discuss those later in the course as we cover each of these high level steps in more detail. And in fact you probably have noticed that this process aligns with the modules of this course. You will see in module three, we’ll talk about identification and prioritisation of work in a lot more detail. And Module four is all about the planning of maintenance and we’ll discuss the basic maintenance planning principles that you need to put to good use. Scheduling is discussed in module six and in module seven, we’ll tackle the execution of work which is a relatively short module. Module eight focuses on the close out of work and we’ll discuss how we review and improve performance in module nine. Now before we do that, I want to have a closer look at each of these six steps in the remainder of this lesson so you truly understand what the end to end process looks like and which of these six basic elements aim to achieve.

01:49

The first step in the maintenance planning and scheduling process is the identification of work. Converting that work into high quality work requests and then prioritising those work requests in a robust and objective method. You see a quality work request is the start of an efficient and effective maintenance process and allowing work requests with inadequate or inaccurate information to proceed through your planning and scheduling process, it’s going to waste a lot of your time and effort. And remember we were introducing planning and scheduling to drive efficiency and increase our productivity. So we cannot let poor quality work requests slip through because that’s going to waste people’s time and you need to use this step as a gate.

02:30

And conduct a quality check in effect to see that new work requests as they are raised are detailed and accurate enough to let them pass through and a good way to do that is to agree as an organisation on a basic quality standard. Agreeing on what needs to be in there and to what level of detail and then make sure that all your new work requests are reviewed against that standard and if they don’t meet the quality standard, they need to be corrected.

02:56

Now the area where many organisations go wrong is in the prioritisation of new work, you must make sure that you adopt a robust and objective system for prioritisation of new maintenance work requests. If you’re like many organisations out there who start out with planning and scheduling are in a reactive maintenance environment, you will be getting a whole heap of work requests coming through each and every day. And unless you prioritise these work requests properly, you’ll never break through that reactive maintenance cycle. Prioritisation is truly a critical step and you really need to get it right. In module three of this course, I’m going to provide you with two different prioritisation approaches that are both robust and objective. And ultimately the outcome of this step in the process of identification and prioritisation of work is a high-quality prioritised work request that will enable the rest of the process to flow as efficiently and effectively as possible.

03:50

The second step in the process is planning and as we saw earlier, planning is the what and how of the job. Now, some people actually call this work preparation to avoid the confusion with the word “planning” because in industry very often the word “planning” essentially really means scheduling. People talk about planning when in fact they’re putting Gantt charts together, which is really much more much about scheduling. Now planners enable the efficiency of a work group. They ensure no time is wasted on the figuring out how to do a job in what sequence or what materials orsti what tools are required, and they make sure that technicians are not wasting their time trying to locate those tools and materials.

04:30

Planners ensure that all maintenance work is fully planned. And fully planned means that the following has been identified and organised. You have a clearly defined work scope in place and a method of how the job should be executed. You have the materials and the parts you need in place, you have access organised things like scaffolding. You have any external labour or contractors organised and ready to go. Any special tools or hired equipment that is required is there. Any equipment or plant shutdowns that have been identified and organised and any special safety or environmental precautions have been identified and organised.

05:11

And the outcome of the planning phase is a fully planned, fully staged and kitted job, a job that is ready for execution. And once a job is at this stage, the planner should mark the job as ready for execution in your CMMS. And then that is the handover point to the scheduler who then knows that this job is ready to go and can be scheduled. And so the next step in the process is scheduling. And if planning is the what and how, then scheduling is more or less the who and when. So why bother with scheduling? Well, you need to see scheduling as goal setting. We agree to an amount of work that needs to be completed and then we measure our success in terms of schedule compliance. Scheduling ensures that a sufficient amount of work is agreed to be done during the week based on actual and available labour capacity. Planning eliminates waste during jobs.

06:06

But planning alone is not enough to get truly efficient. We need scheduling to ensure we don’t waste time between jobs and that we commit enough work into our schedule and that we remain disciplined. But scheduling is also important for coordination, coordination between trades to make sure the electrician required to isolate electric drive associated with the pump is there on time so that a mechanical technician doesn’t end up waiting 2 hours for an electrician. Scheduling enables coordination between maintenance and operations so that there is an agreement upfront about what equipment can be taken offline and what can’t. You don’t want to have that conversation during the week when a job was about to start because now your technicians will be waiting around and wasting their time.

06:32

Scheduling enables coordination with your warehouse too. It allows your warehouse staff to ensure all the materials, tools, parts, et cetera that are required to do a job are all neatly organised in boxes tagged with a work order so that the your technician can simply come and pick up their relevant box and start the job. Or even better get those boxes delivered to the work site if that’s possible.

07:12

And the outcome of the scheduling step is an agreed and approved frozen weekly schedule that lists all the jobs that are due to be done that following week. You need to take into account all your constraints around how much labor we have, what plant and equipment can be taken offline or not, and what the priorities are for the week. With then measure our performance against that frozen weekly schedule using a basic schedule compliance metric to see if we indeed did do what we said we would do.

07:39

And although we talk about planning and scheduling a lot, it really is actually all about executing the work. That’s why we do all this. We go through all this effort of planning and scheduling to get efficient and effective execution of our maintenance in place. So the execute work is the heart of our process. As part of the execute step, the maintenance crew now has the frozen weekly schedule that has been handed over. And they focus on getting all of that work completed on time, safe and to the right quality standards. Once the frozen weekly schedule has been communicated, the maintenance supervisor will allocate the work out to the crew and the crew now owns that work.

08:20

The planner has done the preparation and everything should be in place to execute the work efficiently, but if it’s not, then it’s up to the maintenance supervisor and the crew to address any issues, whether that be a missing part or a difference in how the job needs to be executed. The supervisor and the crew need to solve this. We’re not going to get our planner involved in this and we’ll talk a lot more about that later in the course, but for now, just keep that in mind. Ultimately, the outcome of this step would be the timely and safe and quality completion of the work that is in our frozen weekly schedule.

08:54

Once the work is physically completed, it needs to be properly closed out in your CMMS. That means the crew will need to record the technical history, provide feedback to the planner on the quality of the jobs. Was everything there? Were there any parts missing? Was the sequence correct? Were the job durations, task durations, correct? All that needs to be fed back to the planner and as part of this step, your maintenance supervisor should be reviewing the technical history that is entered by the technicians and make sure that it meets your quality standards for technical history. And at the same time the supervisor might be flagging certain jobs for requiring a root cause analysis. It could be that the crew has had to do this repair several times over now or it could be that is such an expensive repair that we really want to get to the bottom of why this happened?

09:42

Even if you have a highly effective reliability engineer, who always picks up on these things, you still want to give your maintenance supervisor and his crew the ability to flag something that might need an RCA. That way things get detected faster but it also builds ownership. The final part of closing out the job will be making sure all payments are made and for example, hire equipment is returned on time, et cetera. Ultimately the outcome of this step is a fully closed job in the CMMS.

10:13

The final step in the planning and scheduling process is to review and improve performance. I tend to look at this in two ways. One part of the improvement cycle relates to the actual equipment. You review the technical history of the equipment, the frequency of failures and you identify improvement opportunities from there, but that’s not really part of the planning and scheduling process. Although the collection of the data that is used in the improvement step is part of a process. Analysing the technical history and identifying defects isn’t really part of planning and scheduling. That’s another process and so we’re not really going to go into that part of the improvement cycle as part of this course.

10:50

The second way of looking at improvement is actually looking at how your planning and scheduling process is working and using a standardised set of performance metrics, you can determine if your performance is trending in a right direction. Are you getting enough work done? Do you still have a lot of emergency maintenance breaking into your frozen week? How good are the job plans as created by your planner? Are the estimates for job durations reasonably accurate? Do you still find yourself wasting a lot of time looking for materials that were not identified in the job plans? As you look at your performance and the performance metrics that measure these things, you’ll be able to identify a series of small improvements. We’re not looking for major changes but small improvements that your planner, your scheduler or your execution crew can make relatively quickly.

11:39

Small improvements that make sure the work is done just a little bit faster, a little bit safer, a little bit cheaper, a little bit better next time around. And again and again and again. Overtime, all those little improvements really add up. And that brings us to the end of the overview of the planning and scheduling process. This was just a quick introduction and in the following modules we’re going to delve deep into each of these phases. Before we do that, there’s one last thing I really want to cover and that is the difference between planning and scheduling, which I’ll talk about in the next video.

Video 3

Planning & Scheduling are shown as very distinct elements in a process for a reason and that is because planning and scheduling are not the same.

00:09

Over the years many organisations have confused planning with scheduling and in many organisations, planning and scheduling have ended up almost being used as synonyms. Now we need to set that right before we continue with the rest of the course or we’re going to have a lot of confusion down the line because planning and scheduling are not the same and we cannot use them as synonyms. Now planning and scheduling in the maintenance world is a bit different than the planning and scheduling process that you would may use when you’re preparing for say, a major project or a turnaround or a shutdown. But in both instances, planning and scheduling are still not the same. What is considered planning or what is scheduling when we talk about maintenance is different from when we talk about projects. So to be very clear, when I talk about planning here, I’m talking about planning from a maintenance perspective and the same for scheduling.

00:58

So in the maintenance world, planning should be seen as defining what needs to be done and how or as we show here, planning is the what and the how. And once that’s done, scheduling focuses on who will execute the job and when. So scheduling is the who and the when. Now, of course there are some subtle overlaps here like the fact that the scheduling has to adhere to certain constraints that you might have set during the planning process. And that during the planning process you may well sometimes have to set specific dates. If for example, a major piece of equipment is taken out of service, you may have to fix those dates so it can only be at a certain time.

01:37

But in general, this is a simple and effective differentiation. Planning is the what and how and scheduling is the who and when. So clearly planning and scheduling are different. They have different objectives and very importantly, they require different skills. Planning requires technical understanding of both the equipment that is being maintained and the job that is being done. And that typically means that the planner is someone with a trade background, somebody with a technical background, somebody who’s done the job before.

02:10

Scheduling on the other hand, does not require the same level of detailed technical knowledge. And so scheduling is something that can be done very well by somebody without the technical background, without the trade background. Scheduling is much more to do with data and administration and so you can train up an administrator to become a very effective scheduler, very effectively, but you’re going to struggle to take that same administrator and train them up to become a maintenance planner. We’re going to talk more about this throughout the rest of the course, but it’s important to get this clear upfront.

02:45

Now another way to look at how planning and scheduling differ from each other is to consider their role in our overall work management process in how we use them to increase efficiency. Planning aims to avoid delay during the execution of work, by making sure everything is in place before the job is started. A clear scope, a clear method. Access requirements are sorted. Spares and materials are on site and any external labor has been mobilised. Planning makes sure that you have everything in place to do the job before you start the job so the job can be done without any unnecessary delay. Scheduling on the other hand, is about making sure that we don’t have delays between jobs. When you schedule work for the week, you put enough work in the schedule to keep your crews focused and busy. As part of scheduling, you group work together so crews can do multiple jobs on the same equipment at once rather than coming back later again.

03:42

So for now it’s enough to keep this in mind. Planning is the what and how. Scheduling is the who and when. So with all of us now crystal clear on the fact that planning and scheduling are not the same. We can now wrap up this lesson and keep in mind the six basic elements of our planning and scheduling process which were to identify and prioritise work, plan the work, schedule the work, execute that same work, close out the work and review our performance for opportunities to improve.

04:12

And that brings me to the end of this lesson. The three main key points of this lesson were first, for you to understand the basic steps of any maintenance planning and scheduling process. The six we just talked about. Secondly, for you to understand the difference between planning and scheduling. This difference is really often misunderstood and it is really important that you get this right and understand it. Otherwise, you will never achieve the benefits from planning and scheduling. And the third key point was to start seeing planning and scheduling as a process, a business process that is repeated over and over and over again in your business, in your organisation. And that repetition is something we’re going to use to our advantage in the rest of the course.