Planners being used to expedite parts
• Maintenance personnel arriving at the jobsite and waiting for the asset/system to be shut down (wait is over 15 minutes)
• Frequent trips to storeroom by maintenance personnel
• Production downtime always more than estimated
Enhancing Planning Capabilities
Planning capabilities can be enhanced by ensuring the following:
• Employees are involved and understand their roles. Educate all maintenance stakeholders, from plant managers to the maintenance technician in the P&S process, to ensure all players understand their roles.
• Planners may require additional assistance in developing effective work plans. It is recommended that a senior maintenance technician be assigned to the maintenance planners for a few hours each day. This will help in developing better work plans. Rotating other personnel such as craft supervisors and senior craft personnel in planning support jobs is a good practice. It helps them to understand why planning is important and how it functions.
FIGURE 4.9 A Planned Job Template
FIGURE 4.10 A Planner’s Checklist
• Maintenance planners must have a library of information,including equipment manuals, drawings, specifications, and specific equipment manufacturer manuals and other documentation.
• Planners shouldn’t perform additional work such as filling in for a temporary or relief supervisor or safety or environmental representative. The planner is not a secretary or clerk.
Additionally, planners shouldn’t expedite parts for breakdowns or problems. Their responsibility is to ensure that future work is planned properly so it can be executed effectively. This also ensures that they do not get wrapped up in the day-to-day operations and maintenance issues. Two points to keep in mind:
• Planners should have technical and hands-on experience as a maintenance technician or craftsperson.
• The planned work package should be reviewed by a craft supervisor to validate that the work package is doable as planned before scheduling.
Understanding Scheduling Basics
Scheduling ensures that resources—personnel, material, and the asset on which the job is to be performed—will be available for maintenance at a specified time and place. Scheduling is a joint maintenance and operations activity in which maintenance agrees to make resources available at a specific time when the asset can also be made available by the operations. Jobs should be scheduled to have the least impact on normal operations.
Once a job has been planned, its status is moved to “Ready to Schedule.” Now the job will go to the scheduler, who works with operations and maintenance supervision to develop a schedule that optimizes operations needs with the availability and capacity of the maintenance resources. Organizations use different strategies for scheduling plans. For example, some use monthly, weekly, and daily schedules, whereas others use only weekly schedules. Many organizations also maintain a rolling quarterly and yearly schedule. A yearly schedule usually consists of high-level schedules providing visibility of major outage and turnaround plans.
Scheduling of equipment—the assets for maintenance—is not an easy task. Many times production/operations are busy meeting customers’ needs or have an excuse not to release equipment for maintenance activities for various reasons. Generally, there are four key stakeholders (group/departments) that need assets to produce or perform some maintenance work or improvement/capital project work. Those stakeholders are the operations/production department, plant maintenance,capital projects group, and utility group including controls/SCADA people. Organizations should establish a process where the needs of all stakeholders are collected and conflicts resolved in a timely manner so that all stakeholders get the asset on an agreeable schedule. Figure 4.11 illustrates an example of the organization’s integrated scheduling process. It helps to resolve conflicts and keeps all players engaged and able to get their work accomplished.
Schedules are built by assigning dates as requested by the requester. Some jobs need to be reprioritized to attend to the most pressing problems first. Thereafter, the large majority of the available time remaining in the schedule is filled with jobs that are selected in accordance with management’s priority or other important criteria. Preventive maintenance jobs should be given high priority; they need to be scheduled to meet their due dates.
Once a job is on the schedule, the materials list should go to the MRO store for parts kitting and material staging before the specified schedule date. In many organizations, the CMMS/EAM system does this work automatically. In addition, the job work package will be delivered or made available to the individuals who will execute the job.
When the scheduled time for the job arrives, the maintenance personnel will have everything they need for the job:
FIGURE 4.11 Integrated Scheduling Plan
1. A work permit to execute the job
2. The asset ready to be released by operations personnel:
a. Ready for lockout/tagout measures
b. The system already flushed or cleaned if necessary
3. The material/parts on hand including specified tools and material-handling equipment (or at the site)
4. The right maintenance personnel with proper safety measures—appropriate personal protection equipment (PPE)
5. The job or work package that has all the details and work instructions explaining how work will be executed
There should be no delays when the maintenance personnel arrive at the jobsite. They should only have to complete the permits and set their own locks of the asset before starting the job. Ideally, the job should progress without any hitch; however, there will be some issues. The planner/scheduler should be available to answer any job-related questions, and the craft supervisor needs to ensure the quality of work.
Doc Palmer, mentioned earlier in the chapter, is a noted authority in the area of maintenance planning and scheduling. He cites six basic scheduling principles:
1. Job plans providing the number of persons required, lowest required craft skill level, craftwork hours per skill, and job duration information are necessary for effective scheduling.
2. Weekly and daily schedules must be adhered to as closely as possible. Proper priorities must be placed on new work orders to prevent undue interruption of these schedules.
3. A scheduler develops a 1-week schedule for each crew based on craft hours available, forecast that shows the highest skill available, job priorities, and information from the job plans. Consideration is also made of multiple jobs on the same equipment or system and proactive and reactive work available.
4. The 1-week schedule assigns work for every available work hour. The schedule allows for emergencies and high-priority,reactive jobs by scheduling a significant amount of work on easily interrupted tasks. Preference is given to completing higher-priority work by underutilizing available skill levels for completing lower-priority work.
5. The crew supervisor develops a daily schedule 1 day in advance using current job progress, the 1-week schedule, and new high-priority, reactive jobs as a guide. The crew supervisor matches personnel skills and tasks. The crew supervisor handles the current day’s work and problems even to rescheduling the entire crew for emergencies.