Maintenance Planning & Scheduling| Alaa El-Deen Omar
Maintenance
Planning & Discussion Session
Scheduling
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
Does the Good Doctor fly blind?
Why should we bother with this job
plan thing anyway, after all the Technicians
know what to do, right? If you were undergoing surgery, in addition to
the proper training; you would expect a surgical team to have a set of
procedures and checklists to perform their work on you. What if they
started operating out of sequence before you were fully sedated? What if
they left some of their tools or sponges behind when they closed you up?
I hear you saying “But, we aren’t dealing with life or death when we work
on equipment!” When you consider the environmental and safety
consequences of the equipment that we work on, that may not be the
case. I would guess that many of the people involved with some of the
life ending and environmental disasters in recent memory never
expected things to end the way they did either.
The bottom line is that the job plan can help bring precision to
our maintenance work with specifications like tolerances, gaps, fits,
torque and so on.. They serve to provide checklists and sequential steps.
The plans can be used as training tools when we capture the knowledge
before people retire which is an ever more frequent occurrence. The
effective job plan can save the technicians from spending hours
searching for information or materials. It can also prevent accidents by
providing concise lock out and tag out information along with the
necessary PPE and required permits. One of the best parts to job plans is
that they are reusable as much of our work is repeatable.
What other reasons do you have for creating and
maintaining job plans? Are you successful with them?
If not, why not?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
The maintenance Job Plan Outline
If you are like many Maintenance Planners that I have the opportunity
to interface with, most aren’t doing much using the job plan concept. The
intent of the job plan is to better enable the craftspeople to execute their job
with the materials, tools, and information in hand. Ideally, you really want a
template to facilitate the development of these job plans. What should some of
the headers be for a job plan template? Here’s an outline that you may want to
start with.
Asset number
Asset name
Crafts required
Estimated hours per craft
Total job duration (to be able to tell our Operations partners
how long we need the equipment)
Safety considerations
Tasks and sequence
Materials and Parts (Stock or purchased)
Consumables (i.e. shop towels, penetrating lubricant spray)
Tools and equipment (i.e. 2” impact socket, grease gun, 40’
man-lift)
Housekeeping and/ or disposal
Revision history
Most of these outline items can be used regardless of whether
it’s a PM or Corrective Action job plan.
Is there anything else you would add?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
Get Out from Behind the Desk
The Maintenance Planner is charged with the
creation and maintenance of the job plan to help drive the efficiency of the
craftspeople. Since the ideal Maintenance Planner is one of your best
craftspeople, they should be quite knowledgeable with regards to the steps
required to complete a maintenance job. However, there is an old saying that
“the shortest pencil is better than the longest memory” for good reason,
especially if you listen to how my wife reflects on how short my memory really
is. I think it’s more of a case of selective hearing but I’m not going to tell her
that.
Anyway… I was recently working with a group of Maintenance Planners
and they shared some maintenance tasks lists with me. When I reviewed the
procedures, I thought there might be some gaps in the tasks and their
sequence. I like to adhere to the “show me” approach so I suggested that we
actually walk down one of the jobs. When we started the walk down, the
Planner showed vast knowledge on the job. The only problem was about 75%
of the activities weren’t on the job plan. He would mention a task and I would
comment back “Oops, that’s not on the plan”. He would go to another task and
ask “Is that on the plan?”. My reply often was “Nope”.
When we got back to their desks, the Planners told me how eye-
opening that exercise was. It turns out that a number of the Job Plans had
been done from the desk using their memory. It’s much better to walk the job
and jot down the steps so that you don’t miss things from memory.
When you walk the job, you should consider the following items in
addition to the normal job plan items:
– Routing of the task steps, especially if they are located on multiple
levels or require the closing/ opening of valves in a sequential pattern
as examples.
– Special tools required, even items like a rope and bucket to pull up tools
to the top of the structure if using a ladders
– Task sequence
– OEM cut sheets and other information required to properly set up or
calibrate items.
What other items should you add?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
From a maintenance perspective, are you
scheduling Operations and other support functions?
In many organizations, I find that people are not
utilizing the CMMS/EAM to the fullest extent with respect to “crafts” when it
comes to coordinating work. You will probably tell me, “ no surprise there”. It
doesn’t have to be this way.
Let me explain what I mean. When I look at schedules for maintenance
work, rarely do I see crafts listed other than those from the maintenance
organization. Let’s take a job like welding on a product tank in a plant as an
example. We need Operations personnel to empty and purge the tank in
advance of the welding work. Once the welding work is complete, we may need
Operations to clean and purge the vessel. Following on, Quality Services or
inspection personnel may be required to radiography and non-destructive tests
and release it for refill with product. These are all coordination activities that
we want to cover with child work orders as an example. In addition, should we
not coordinate these activities from a scheduling perspective?
The bottom line is that just like we have crafts such as pipefitter,
mechanic, or electrician, we should also have operator, lab tech, or other
support functions identified in the CMMS. The work of those individuals and the
required coordination of those activities should appear on the weekly schedule
with the work order numbers/ work descriptions. When we are in next week’s
scheduling meeting, we can set the expectation with Operations and our other
partners that we will be needing assistance with equipment availability,
possibly help with the maintenance tasks themselves, and the restart of that
equipment. Approaching our maintenance tasks and their coordination from a
more holistic inclusive viewpoint helps us build better partnerships with the
other stakeholders.
Check your schedule and your approach. Are you
doing this?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
Maintenance Technicians or Maintenance Planners?
Do you believe that a Maintenance Technician should perform job
planning for some of their work or is that solely the role of the Maintenance
Planner? If you find for the Technician, should a Work Order be written by the
Maintenance Planner to account for the Technician’s time?
A primary goal of Maintenance Planning and Scheduling is to drive the
efficiency of the crafts by preparing job plans that contain the crafts required,
estimated hours, materials, tasks and sequence, and so on. If the crafts are
preparing their own plans, then why do we need the Planner you might ask?
I think that there is middle ground in this discussion. Yes, we want the
Planner developing job plans and other Maintenance Planning functions. I’ll
add that we want the Maintenance Planner focused on the future (next week
and beyond). However, the Maintenance Planner can’t be everything to
everyone and aren’t experts in all the jobs they may be asked to plan. Ideally,
the Maintenance Planner should develop the majority of the job plans. If they
don’t know, I believe it’s good to get input from the Technicians and
Supervisors on the job plans. I hesitate to use the term “last resort” but for
more complex jobs where the Maintenance Planner has no idea; I like to see a
work order written to the Maintenance Technician to develop the job plan
content, especially from a materials required perspective. This allows the
Technician to be scheduled for the plan development activity and gives them a
work order to account for their time. The job plan doesn’t have to be perfect as
it should contain the information needed to improve the craft efficiency
(materials, crafts, and hours as a minimum). Remember the job plan process
has a continuous improvement loop where the Technician can document more
detail as the job execution occurs which allows the Planner to update the
content on the Work Order closure process.
What are your thoughts?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
Give me 30 minutes – the Weekly Scheduling
Meeting.
When it comes to the weekly Maintenance Scheduling meeting, I
generally see two separate spectrums. The first is no meeting or no attendees,
and ultimately, no real schedule. On the opposite end, I see the long drawn out
review of the entire backlog, most of which we don’t have materials for or
resources to do in the current week. That might be OK if you have very little
backlog. Most don’t. I believe you would agree that we spend way too much
time in meetings reviewing the same items week after week.
For effective scheduling meetings there are three primary components which
are process, partnerships, and discipline. From a process perspective, the
Planner Schedulers working together in advance to draft the schedule, email it
early in the week to the other partners, and coordinate priorities prior to the
weekly scheduling meeting. To be effective, there must be a partnership
among the stakeholders to provide timely responses to changes to the draft
before the meeting. The Planner Schedulers should run the scheduling meeting
and use an agenda to keep everyone focused. The discipline comes in sticking
to the process and everyone enforcing the mutual partnership.
From a timing perspective, I believe you can strive for the first 15 minutes of
the meeting being utilized to confirm the prioritized work schedule for next
week. There should only be one schedule, not one for each craft. Follow that
with 15 minutes to share last week’s metrics and to discuss any schedule
breaks. Work to limit the weekly scheduling meeting to 30 minutes in total.
Is this an achievable goal in your organization? What do
you see as barriers?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Discussion Point
20 Thoughts on Maintenance Planner Scheduler Tasks
The Maintenance Planning and Scheduling function has
four basic objectives:
To provide the right information for the technician to more easily to
perform the job
Have identified the right parts and materials, having them staged and
kitted
Interface with the Operations partner to ensure the equipment is
available for Maintenance at the specified time
To ensure the right priority Maintenance work is accomplished based
on business needs
In the end, the function is all about doing the right work while addressing
avoidable delays i.e. driving technician wrench time up.
To do this, there are a number of tasks that the Planner Scheduler performs.
1. Avoids getting involved with this week’s emergency work as
planning must be focused on the future.
2. Reviews work orders requiring planning to understand the
requested work.
3. Evaluates and understands planned work priorities.
4. Job scoping/ research – spends 1/3 of the day in the field.
5. Prepares job plans based on level of detail required.
6. Maintains a job plan library for reuse.
7. Identifies and requisitions/ reserves parts and materials.
8. Prepares the job package.
9. Interfaces with the Operations group to validate work priority and
equipment availability.
10. Collaborates with Maintenance Supervisors on next week’s available
labor hours to build the weekly schedule from.
11. Develops the next week’s maintenance schedule based on priority.
12. Provides a level of coordination in the planning and scheduling
phases, not during the execution of the work which the
responsibility of maintenance supervision.
13. Leads the weekly maintenance scheduling meeting.
14. Ensures the preventive maintenance program is scheduled and
work-leveled.
15. Maintains the asset hierarchy if so required.
16. Develops and improving the asset bill of materials.
17. Reports on the Key performance indicators (KPI) if required.
18. Performs other administration tasks of the CMMS/ EAM if required.
19. Reviews completed job feedback to improve job plan content and
estimates.
20. Integrates key words on work order closure to assist the data
mining for reliability engineering purposes.
Are these tasks what you expect for the Maintenance
Planner Scheduler? Would you take any away and why?
What others would you add and why?
Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Course, Eng./ Alaa E. Omar.