Resources for planning and scheduling

Develop a Plan to Reach Continuous Improvement Goals

2012-09-06T09:05:27-05:00

In the ever-changing world of continuous improvement, we must always remember to walk our own walk. If we, as continuous improvement leaders, are teaching and coaching people in the plan, do, check and act (PDCA) process, we too must ensure that we are leading by example. We must not vary our process from this cycle of improvement that works so very well.

Too many companies get so focused on the DCA part of the equation that planning is completely left out or is at best an afterthought. We do, check, act, do, check, act over and over again so many times that we are working really hard in several different directions.

Instead, I challenge you to be very deliberate in your planning process. Since I am focused on continuous improvement, I am writing this note from that perspective.

Minimize Waste with a Smooth Work Flow

2012-08-13T08:55:00-05:00

One of the most common performance metrics is planned vs. unplanned work orders. The benchmark goal has been 90 percent planned (preventive maintenance and other planned activities) and 10 percent unplanned corrective/breakdown maintenance. In reality, with most organizations the ratio is anywhere from 10 to 30 percent planned maintenance to 90 to 70 percent unplanned. This is indicative of operating in a reactive mode, which contributes to waste, reduced equipment life and lost productivity.

A thorough understanding and analysis of a maintenance work process flow makes it easier to identify and eliminate waste. The goal is not only to eliminate waste but to develop an improved work process flow that is more effective and productive. As the flow is thoroughly reviewed and analyzed, the entire process flow becomes visible and wasteful activities such as delays, unnecessary travel and the like are easily identified.

Following are some ways to minimize wasteful activi

Expert Tips for Planning a CMMS Project

2012-06-08T08:18:30-05:00

A well-planned and executed computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) project can yield a maximum return on your investment. This return is realized through increased efficiency, productivity and profits. However, a poorly planned and executed CMMS project can result in a loss of revenue. These losses can be measured in terms of the overall investment in the project, as well as from wasted time and lost projected revenue forecast tied to the successful installation and implementation of a CMMS.

Planning

Properly planning the CMMS implementation project is one of the key elements. In the planning phase, you determine the “what,” “why,” “who” and “how.”

Equipment Data

Developing a plan for equipment data is a good first step because it will provide a CMMS with a foundation of hard, verifiable data. Some maintenance departments may already employ an equipment numbering scheme that is effective

Ensure Planning and Scheduling Success

2012-06-04T08:25:20-05:00

How do you initially train someone new to the planner/scheduler position? First, let’s talk about the selection process, as I see this as an issue in many organizations. Ideally, the planner/scheduler should be one of your best craftspeople. You have to compensate the position at a level at least equal to your first-level supervision. The compensation should include accounting for the average overtime earned as a craftsperson if you expect them to apply for the position. You will not get many applicants if you are asking them to accept a significant reduction in their pay.

In addition to being a highly skilled craftsperson, the candidate should have good computer skills, a positive attitude, people-oriented and be self-motivated.

After you have identified the right person, the obvious next step is to get that person trained. You generally have a couple of choices here. You can send them off to a class, or you can host an on-site course.

This brings us to

How to Start a Reliability Program

2012-05-31T09:16:03-05:00

Where do I start? I have heard this question many times, and there is no easy answer other than “pick a spot.” What I mean is that normally when a company decides to start a reliability program, there are a lot of improvements to be made in other areas as well. I have never heard of a facility in which everything is perfect and the only thing they need to do is start a reliability program to become world class.

Reliability is tied to almost every other area in a facility, and so when one area is at a low point, other areas are also suffering. I would call on all of the experienced reliability veterans to offer their suggestions to help those who want to start a reliability program.

Pick a Spot

Gather all of your best people, including the top people

Reduce Waste to Improve Reliability

2012-05-29T08:43:57-05:00

It seems as if new weight-loss programs and products come out every week. One of the latest is a plastic wrap you place around your stomach. If you strap it around your stomach, you will sweat and lose weight. Brilliant! Of course, you’ll probably sweat if you wrap anything air-tight around your stomach.

Perhaps the more interesting thought is to wonder why we fall for this stuff over and over when we all know the basic concepts in weight loss, such as:

Less energy intake will reduce fat
More exercise will burn fat
More muscle mass will increase metabolism

If you know and understand these basic principles of weight loss, you can apply them and become very successful in losing weight. You will learn that it takes hard work to improve your metabolism and that it is a long-term lifestyle commitment, not a short-term project. This sounds awfully similar to reliability improvements, doesn’t it? Perhaps that

Best Practices for Maintenance Supervisors

2012-04-09T09:30:17-05:00

I had the privilege of visiting a large pharmaceutical plant in North Carolina several years ago. It was in response to a presentation I had made on just what should supervisors be doing. My organization was undergoing a work sampling on our 2,800 maintenance supervisors to help us get a handle on what they were actually doing.

Most managers felt that we had burdened the supervisor with too much administrative work and, as a result, kept them from being on the floor interfacing with operations, providing assistance to the craftsperson and evaluating reliability performance. I wondered if our supervisors comprehended the need for face time and what that meant. I personally needed to get a handle on what I was to define as “face time.”

We were introduced to the plant’s maintenance management team and the dayshift maintenance coach. He had a team of 18 facilities craft persons who maintained the building and environmental equipment for a million-square-foo

Signs You are in the Real World of Maintenance

2012-04-02T08:59:42-05:00

Anyone who has ever done plant maintenance improvement work is inevitably accused at times of just not knowing what it’s like in the “real world” of maintenance. So, here are some of the things I remember from that “real world” of maintenance.

You can’t ever get on the paging system because it is always tied up with people paging for maintenance help.
Maintenance personnel have to carry more than one beeper because one is always busy.
Maintenance personnel really need to work on their responsiveness because they have trouble responding to more than one page at a time.
Maintenance personnel are constantly driving by in really fast yellow carts with bright flashing lights and sirens. (Some are actually dressed in blue tights with red capes.)
Everyone really supports the planning and scheduling of maintenance work, as long as they can get a one-day turnaround on their work orders.

3 Ways to Achieve Successful Reliability

2012-03-07T08:10:25-06:00

Reliability is important to every manufacturing operation. Successful reliability requires communication, cooperation and coordination. To learn the importance of these three Cs, let’s examine how your organization is structured and how it operates.

How much does unscheduled downtime cost and where does the responsibility for that unscheduled downtime lie? Is the unscheduled downtime because someone unilaterally decided to run to failure, or is it because the work request was in the “system” but not responded to in a timely fashion to preclude the unscheduled downtime caused by an unscheduled failure?

Does a competent operator know when there is an anomaly with the equipment? Since a good operator is a living, breathing data-acquisition machine, the answer is a resounding “Yes!” In the state of normal operation, good operators are cognizant of anomalies in the equipment they operate approximately one-fourth of the week.

A follow-u

How Learning Can Change Behavior, Produce Results

2012-02-29T08:14:35-06:00

Many people are familiar with A3 analysis as a management process – a methodology for thinking, planning, problem-solving and then starting all over again. In this process, you begin by defining the problem, describing the current conditions, and defining goals and targets (what’s the desired outcome?). Next, you analyze what has caused the gap between current conditions and the desired outcome, and you design a countermeasure to help you reach the future state. Then, the A3 process calls for planning who will do what, plus a follow-up step to capture what has happened, what you’ve learned and what issues remain.

Many elements of this A3 analysis apply to planning for and implementing effective learning strategies. There’s a big gap when it comes to workplace learning – the gap between what often constitutes training and the desired outcome of improved performance. If you invest in learning and nothing changes, has learning taken place?

Ofte

5 Secrets for an Effective Bill of Materials

2012-02-15T08:53:07-06:00

If your company was manufacturing automobiles, appliances, iPads or even cardboard boxes, you certainly wouldn’t think about scheduling production without a complete and accurate bill of materials (BOM) for each finished product so you could determine your raw material requirements from a master schedule. So why is it that many process industries not only begin operation without equipment BOMs, but go for years – sometimes decades – without them?

When we ask people to assess the quality of their equipment BOMs, the comments we get most often are: “They don’t exist,” or “We have some of the data, but we don’t know if it’s accurate.” When we ask why that’s the case, the response is usually: “We don’t have the information,” or more likely, “We don’t have the resources to do all that work.”

So instead of taking the time to build and maintain the BOMs, they just g

Involve the Right People for Effective Change

2012-02-08T10:05:42-06:00

In “Alice in Wonderland,” the white rabbit is eternally behind schedule and skittishly hyperactive. What is easily overlooked is his firm grasp of the subtle intricacies of effective change management. For example, he off-handedly advises Alice, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

Although this statement initially appears counterintuitive – after all, much of formal change management is getting individuals to actually do things differently – the change will only be effective when the right people do the right things.

Oftentimes during change, so much emphasis is placed on end results that we take shortcuts on the way those end results are achieved. For instance, during a recent engagement, a client was implementing a new process for the operators to follow. To meet the expectation of a speedy implementation, the area manager intended to provide the process training to the operators. On the surface, that might not sound like a

How to Use Key Performance-based Metrics

2012-02-01T08:38:35-06:00

In today’s competitive global environment, we are constantly being asked to do more with less. Now more than ever, companies are asking their employees to become more productive, more efficient and more “lean.”

Strategic planning, value stream mapping, reliability engineering, loss elimination – these phrases have become popular from the boardroom to the shop floor. But where does their value really lie? How do we make decisions that uncover value, eliminate loss and allow for proper strategic planning for the future?

The answer lies not in the decisions we make but in the data we use to make those decisions. Good, strong data is key to making good, strong decisions. We are all familiar with the axiom of “garbage in, garbage out.” So what kind of data should we use? What metrics give us the best snapshot of our current levels of performance?

Asset utilization (AU) and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) are key performance

Get More Maintenance Work Done with Proper Planning

2012-01-30T11:43:23-06:00

Famous financier Bernard Baruch was often quoted as saying, “Two and two still and always will equal four.” This, some would say, quaint concept has fallen out of favor more and more in recent years, as clearly the restrictiveness of basic arithmetic is not something that should continue to bind us in today’s brave new world.

It’s much more useful if two and two can equal:

Whatever analysts are expecting it to be (or better).
Whatever your boss wants it to be.
Whatever will make this current project justifiable.

Keeping this in mind, some odd-looking math that actually works in plant maintenance is the rule that:
“10 minus 1 equals 16.5.”

This rule is a huge help with another rule that is always pretty much true:
“In most plants, there are never enough maintenance people.”

If I have 10 maintenance mechanics and

Share the Responsibility for PM Attainment

2012-01-23T08:28:43-06:00

Preventive maintenance (PM) is a cornerstone of reliability-based maintenance. It’s no surprise then that PM attainment has become a key performance indicator (KPI). However, it may surprise you that in many organizations, maintenance is not primarily responsible for this KPI.

Maintenance always has an important role, of course. It must create the PM program. It must generate, schedule and plan PMs. It also must have staff with enough skill to accomplish the PM. If maintenance is missing any of these things, it has a lot of work to do. But if PM attainment is already one of your current KPIs, these steps are probably already being done.

Yet if those planned PMs are not being accomplished, there is another likely reason besides maintenance capability. The most common reason for scheduled PMs not being accomplished is a change in the production schedule removing access to equipment and lines that were scheduled for work.

This doesn’t absolve maintena

Creating an Environment for Planning and Scheduling Success

2012-01-16T08:47:43-06:00

Too many times and in too many organizations, we send people off to training with high expectations that they will lead change and improvement upon their return. We hope that overnight they have become equipped with the skills and knowledge to effectively start doing their new work. Unfortunately, weeks later, the trainee and his or her organization are frustrated with the lack of progress.

Where did we go wrong? Let’s take a recent case that I had the opportunity to witness. ABC Company chose to send its new planner/scheduler off to be trained in the proper procedures for planning and scheduling work. The planner came back to the site with his newly learned planning skills and attempted to plan and schedule work. On the first day back, he attended the normal morning meeting where the issues of the last 24 hours are reviewed and any items left uncorrected are assigned for the day. After the first hour was spent in the meeting, the planner headed off to his office only to be s

Answering Common Maintenance Planning Questions

2012-01-09T09:07:39-06:00

At a recent conference, a number of questions came up that were never properly answered, so I thought I would try to address some of these. The questions involved getting maintenance planners to focus on planning, getting them focused on future work and allowing time to plan.

First, let’s look at roles. The planner should be strategic and focused on future work (i.e., next week and beyond). The supervisor, team leader or lead person should be tactical or focused on today and this week. If parts are needed this week, it’s not the planner but the supervisor who should be dealing with it. The same goes for emergencies; we can’t plan and schedule them, so they should not normally involve planners.

The planning group should be a separate group. The planners should have craft skills; often, they are some of your best craftspeople. However, if you have your planners attending the production meeting where the last 24 hours are reviewed, shame on you. How can th

Defining the Role of a Maintenance Planner

2012-01-03T08:46:09-06:00

Organizations should have a clear work description of what a planner’s role is. The role may vary between organizations, mainly due to plant size. Some organizations have combined planners/supervisors. Some have dedicated planners for shutdowns/turnarounds. Many have people with a planner’s title but no planning.

So how do we figure out a planner’s role? The first step is to decide if you (as a plant) want to have planning. In my opinion, it would be a huge mistake to decide against planning, but if you do, you might as well get rid of planners and/or the role of planning. Most of us will decide we should have planning.

We can’t figure out a clear role unless we first have a clear, agreed-upon workflow that describes in which order we are going to pass on information, to whom and who is responsible. Therefore, the first step is to design clear, agreed-upon workflows (business processes) for our daily work, shutdown work, etc. Once we have the work

How to Achieve Effective Maintenance Planning

2011-12-27T09:21:25-06:00

As Sisyphus well knew, pushing things up mountains is difficult, and the uphill struggle from the reactive to the proactive maintenance world is often a frustrating “three steps forward, two steps back” process. That’s a major reason why so many slide back into the familiar, ugly, day-to-day, survival morass at the bottom.

One of those steps on the way up is where preventive maintenance inspections are getting done, we’re finding things that need to be fixed and we’re fixing them. However, we’re still not getting that much better. We’re constantly fixing the same things over and over.

The famous quote, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” remains as true as always.

Granted, the “find it, fix it and move on” mode is a big step up from the “fix it when it breaks” mode, but it doesn’t look or feel like great improvement, so many get discouraged and tend to look for

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for Success

2011-12-19T10:23:24-06:00

While on a recent flight to Atlanta, I was leafing through a maintenance book when the person across the aisle struck up a conversation. Turns out, he worked as a veteran maintenance supervisor in a large mill where he has worked for the last two years. He spoke about how things were bad from a reactive standpoint and had gotten worse after the mill downsized. As part of the downsizing effort, they had removed some key players and replaced them with some not-so-key players. We talked about how their maintenance planning and scheduling activities were progressing, to which he was disappointed in the progress they had achieved.

It turns out that he had two maintenance planners/schedulers with a span of control of about 1:25, yet he was still doing a tremendous amount of planning and scheduling himself. He commented that the span of 1:25 fell within the best practices guidelines. In addition, he mentioned from previous training that he learned that a planner should be able to plan thr

5 Keys to Maintain Equipment Reliability

2011-12-05T08:55:44-06:00

There is so much similarity in all that we do within the maintenance planning and scheduling world that compares to other separate and distinct functions. Let me explain. Borrowing from root cause analysis process methods, I trust you are familiar with Ishikawa diagrams (also called fishbone diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams). These diagrams are one method that is used for product design, quality defect avoidance or variation, or to identify factors that lead to some event, hence the use in root cause analysis.

The categories typically include:

Man (people)
Methods: How the process is performed and the specific requirements to perform the tasks, including time estimates
Machines: Any equipment, tools, etc., needed to do the job
Materials: Consumables, parts required
Measurements: Data generated from the process

All of these items combine together to create some output or event. In

Why Execution is Key for Business Strategies

2011-11-14T10:54:15-06:00

Business strategies developed by companies are often useless. A business strategy is basically a plan for what the company should focus on in the future. It is a promise and guideline to steer a company in the right direction. It’s not too different from your personal New Year’s resolution.

Most people’s New Year’s resolutions include things such as losing weight, exercising more, drinking less and improving their marriage in some form. The universal formula for change in any personal-improvement book or business book is to:

Understand what to do
Understand how to do it
Execute

Let us compare a business strategy with our beloved New Year’s resolution. We know what the problem is, right? We are fat, unhappy, stressed, whatever. We usually know how to improve (drink less, exercise, spend time with the wife), but we fail to execute.

The hard truth is that we try a little. We s

How to Keep Maintenance in a Proactive Mode

2011-10-31T08:38:36-05:00

I stumbled across some music trivia lately, that the old rock band Chicago finally had its album “Stone of Sisyphus” released a few years ago. One of the more famous “lost” albums, it was originally recorded in the early 1990s but had languished for years, available only in illegal bootleg copies.

That reminded me of when I used to use the story of Sisyphus in maintenance training sessions.

I never encountered a great number of serious Greek mythology students in those sessions, but was always amazed how mythology suddenly grasped attendees’ attention when I started telling about Sisyphus showing up in an episode of the TV series “Xena: Warrior Princess.” A statuesque, obviously very strong gal who always wore a brief, Roman-style leather outfit, Xena

Improve Equipment Effectiveness by Targeting 11 Major Losses

2011-10-24T08:30:38-05:00

Everyone wants a silver bullet to address the competitive environment pressuring profits and, ultimately, jobs in North America. Having transitioned from a controls engineer to a maintenance manager to an operations manager, I can attest to the quest for that silver bullet. The reality is that few levers exist for you to pull that will radically improve the profitability of your organization. With global markets and price supports, commodity costs are generally fixed. The same applies to prices received for your company’s products or services. Labor markets and costs are somewhat fixed as well. With the exception of fuel surcharges, logistics costs are generally set.

As a maintenance or operations manager, your span of control is bound by the four walls of your site. With energy prices, some opportunities exist for cost reduction in pursuing energy audits and savings activities. The largest opportunity is focusing your efforts on improving equipment effectiveness by targeting

How Kitting Can Enhance Reliability

2011-09-14T08:13:15-05:00

In the world of manufacturing, we are looking for better, more efficient ways to improve our production uptime and quality, reduce the cost per unit, improve human capital utilization and create a higher quality of work life for our personnel. Kitting for maintenance crafts to perform their tasks is one of the easier and more effective ways to allow quality completion of the job with minimal productivity impact, especially when accompanied by a well-planned and functionally scheduled job.

Understanding the value of kitting in relation to the value of the time lost requires asking and honestly answering some questions:

Does the job have to be done now or can it wait to be planned and scheduled at a time that minimizes production loss? Will we be able to schedule it at a time that will reduce the amount of product lost through the equipment downtime for the repair?
What materials should be kitted for the job(s)?
Is there a

5 Key Elements of a Well-planned Work Order

2011-08-24T10:26:02-05:00

There are basically five areas that if addressed properly will result in a well-planned work order:

1) The Right People — This focuses on the correct skills required for the scope of work as well as how many and how long (labor estimates) it will take to complete.

2) The Right Place — You should have an accurate identification of the process, equipment and location to reduce travel, investigation and setup times.

3) The Right Time – This should include windows of opportunity to gain access, along with operations’ expectation of starting or completing the work. This will assist the scheduling process.

4) The Right Parts, Tools and Equipment – All repair parts should be identified, ordered and on-hand before scheduling. Arrangements are made for additional specialty tools and equipment.

5) The Specifications, Permits, Hazards, Work Inst

The Maintenance Supervisor Enigma

2011-08-04T16:32:12-05:00

In my pre-retired life, I managed the development of maintenance procedures, PM programs, methods and service tools for all deployed equipment within the U.S. Postal Service. We also monitored our maintenance procedures manuals which incorporated support policies for the maintenance management information system. Any local changes were to be approved on a trial basis by my shop.

At that time, we were scratching our heads on how to get the supervisors out of their desks and out on the floor for more face time with the craft employees. I received a call from a plant maintenance manager requesting to stop recording the employees’ work order time on the daily work schedule forms. This was accomplished at the end of each shift by the supervisors from completed work orders. Each supervisor spent

Industrial Facilities and Processes: Are You Winning on Both Fronts?

2011-06-22T10:35:56-05:00

Problem: At peak production, a plant is turning out enough product to fill a 120,000-square-foot warehouse, but the existing 80,000-square-foot warehouse was built to meet the inventory requirement of the average production volume.

Facilities Solution: Invest millions of dollars to expand the warehouse to 120,000 square feet.

But what if there was a solution that required zero capital investment and optimized both the facility and the processes associated with it? In this case there is: a revised production and inventory changeover strategy that makes more effective use of working capital and existing space.

“Aha!”

Data-driven Team Decisions

Effective solutions such as this are more likely to be identified when all stakeholders collaborate in strategic master planning based on analysis of historic production and demand data.

As i

U.S. Manufacturing Expanding Faster Than Forecast

2011-05-03T08:36:03-05:00

Are you (like many) planning to be reactive?

2011-02-28T10:01:53-06:00

I was recently facilitating a "Maintenance and Reliability for Managers" four-part series course at a particular site when the subject of planning was raised by one of the supervisors attending. As part of the conversation, he commented “but gee, Jeff, I’m planning for my people now”. As it was Tuesday, I asked if he was planning for next week’s schedule or this week. His reply is like so many that I hear, “No, I’m planning for this week, actually two days from now.” Mind you, his site has a planner scheduler. I went on to ask, if the supervisor was doing the planning, who was doing the supervision – i.e. removing obstacles from jobs in progress, determining the development needs of the people, controlling time lost during and between jobs, etc. In the end, it wasn’t him. Turns out no one was performing that function. It begs the question, if the supervisor is doing the planning, what is the maintenance planner scheduler doing? T

Do you know how much it costs to run that equipment?

2011-01-17T16:17:34-06:00

Decisions have to be made – to save energy, to save dollars. Having hard data on which to base those decisions removes the “guess factor” and ultimately has a positive effect on the bottom line. Can recording data, analyzing results and then making intelligent decisions really have that large of a dollar effect, though? The answer is “Absolutely yes!”

Equipment ownership for maintenance technicians

2011-01-17T16:10:05-06:00

As a maintenance technician, do you believe having responsibility for specific equipment is the best way to perform your job? By responsibility, you are the only one that conducts preventive maintenance tasks and major repair work on that specific equipment. Do you believe it’s the right answer for the organization? As a maintenance manager, is this approach to equipment ownership the right answer for you or your stakeholder partners like operations? This facet of maintenance is traditionally a struggle for many organizations.

Tips on maintaining the maintenance spare parts database

2011-01-05T14:10:50-06:00

Groups really struggle with managing their spare parts data due to years of neglect and lack of ownership. On the initial CMMS implementation, the data may have been properly described with a noun/qualifier/qualifier approach for the short text description. As time passes, people move on and someone else takes over the database. They may not receive training or understand the naming concepts. Soon, the users of the data can’t find the parts housed in the storeroom due to the way items have been named. The storeroom inventory value goes up, too, as parts become duplicated since no one could find the stocked item. How do you straighten this mess out?

Lean shutdowns: 10 ways to cut fat and do the right thing

2010-12-28T16:21:09-06:00

For most companies that run continuously, shutdowns and outages consume a lion’s share of both the maintenance and capital budgets. By its very nature, the shutdown is fat. The reason for this is the skewed balance between the cost of downtime and the costs of shutdown resources. In some cases, the costs of having extra resources (such as extra cranes) are dwarfed by the avoided cost of downtime. In this article, Joel Levitt offers 10 concrete ideas that will lean up the shutdown event without compromising safety or environmental security.

Rethinking how strategic planning gets done

2010-12-07T08:50:10-06:00

How business leaders evaluate the landscape, make sense of the environment, proactively shape the opportunities they see and then decide on which course of action to take – in other words, Strategic Planning – deserves far closer attention than it has received so far.

Strategies to optimize shutdowns, turnarounds and outages

2010-12-06T10:21:00-06:00

Poorly executed STOs can cost an organization millions of dollars in lost revenue, drive up operating costs and cause permanent damage to the careers of those involved. This has long been true but is now amplified in the current operational environment, in which most organizations are operating with reduced workforces and resources. Simply put: In today’s business environment, STOs represent not only an increasingly significant challenge, but also an increasingly significant opportunity. Read this article and learn how to maximize your next STO.

Got hoarders? Squirrels? How to overcome hidden stores

2010-11-29T13:57:22-06:00

If you spend much time opening cabinets, drawers and looking behind locked doors in facilities and plant sites, it is almost guaranteed that you will come across someone’s stash of parts and consumable materials. When you begin a maintenance best practices implementation or storeroom improvement effort, one of the first things is to go and collect up all of those parts and materials to put them back into the storeroom. After all, there is a lot of money just laying around out there in those “hidden stores” locations, right?

Maintenance work planning: 5 elements to consider

2010-11-04T15:18:43-05:00

Tim Kister, senior planning and scheduling subject matter expert with Life Cycle Engineering, explains the five elements of work planning that planners frequently give limited attention and detail.

Pop the hood: A maintenance checklist can save your day

2010-11-03T14:58:46-05:00

While most groups will say they have maintenance checklists, requiring their use and accountability are often major factors for success. In your organization, what processes do you have in place to ensure that people use maintenance procedures and checklists? How do you validate their use?

Bad part descriptions can gum up storeroom processes

2010-10-22T09:45:22-05:00

When it comes to storerooms and materials management, one of the struggles that Jeff Shiver repeatedly sees in organizations is the issue of effective part descriptions, especially the short descriptions. This food industry veteran says that it is especially true when you consider the domino effect these descriptions can cause.

Spans of control for maintenance planners and others

2010-10-11T11:53:28-05:00

As you may know, I travel frequently. The first part of the week was no different as I found myself on a flight to Atlanta. I was leafing through a maintenance book when the person across the aisle struck up a conversation. Turns out, he worked as a veteran maintenance supervisor in a large mill where he has worked for the last two years. He spoke about how things were bad from a reactive standpoint and had gotten worse after the mill downsized. As part of the downsizing effort, they had slaughtered some key players and replaced them with some not-so-key players. We talked about how their maintenance planning and scheduling activities were progressing, to which he was disappointed in the progress they had achieved.

Reliability planning: The earlier, the better

2010-09-28T08:06:01-05:00

Proper planning prevents poor performance. Cutting out the roof to extract a critical motor with a helicopter is not the definition of proper planning. Significant thought into maintenance considerations and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) should be part of new project planning. A facility with proper maintenance and reliability planning stands a better chance of maximizing throughput and availability, making them more competitive in the marketplace.

Make sure maintenance work doesn't create process bottlenecks

2010-06-18T09:31:28-05:00

Bottlenecks often occur when the equipment is unable to reliably produce the required output. Potential causes for this may be physical (equipment breaking down often), human (poor work practices) or latent (ineffective planning processes). Maintenance and reliability issues touch on all of these potential causes. This article discusses what aspects of maintenance affect plant output, and then what actions can be taken to mitigate these negative effects.

Round out your HACCP plan for maintenance to cut food risks

2010-04-14T15:10:31-05:00

It's 3:35 p.m. at shift change and the packaging manager finds out that his key packaging machine has jammed its feed roll, and the only maintenance guy still here during shift change is Louie. Louie has done this job several times, but this afternoon, he has been on the raw side of the house fixing a bacon slicer. He could be 30 seconds away by cutting through the oven rooms, but that would be an exception to the HACCP plan. On the other hand, it could take five to 10 minutes to make sure his tools are cleaned up and he arrives relatively germ-free for the next job. What is Louie going to do? What is an acceptable response? What really happens in your plant? What happens next is really up to management.

Strategic workforce planning is emerging as a top priority

2010-02-18T11:21:26-06:00

In the just-published research report from Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company, organizations cited shifting demographics and rapidly evolving business requirements as key factors driving the adoption of workforce planning. The study, Strategic Workforce Planning: Winning Scenarios for Uncertain Times, also found that 64 percent of organizations expect organizational efforts in workforce planning to increase in 2010.

Expert advice on creating partnership agreements

2010-02-04T15:05:56-06:00

Partnership agreements are contracts between functional areas of the plant which have an effect on overall reliability. Developing, fostering and committing to plant partnership agreements is an important element in successful reliability improvement initiatives.

How to get the most out of your CMMS/EAM system

2010-02-02T15:48:14-06:00

This article explores the current trends taking place within computerized maintenance management and enterprise asset management systems, with a look at both the present and future trends emerging. Many firms, quite frankly, have not kept abreast of the many features and functions available to them or have operated in an isolated world.

How Coors Brewing does planning and scheduling

2010-01-16T11:53:00-06:00

Planning and scheduling routine maintenance work is a critical process needed to achieve World Class Operations principles at Coors Brewing Company plants in the United States.

Centralized vs. decentralized maintenance

2008-12-02T00:00:00-06:00

Companies often ask if maintenance planning and scheduling will work if they have a decentralized maintenance organization. Yes, it will. In fact, they need planning and scheduling just as much as a centralized shop. Let's review why.

Centralized maintenance organizations excel at planning and scheduling - to a fault if they don't give adequate attention to operations' concerns. The operations group may feel there is a "maintenance black hole." "Work orders go in, but don't come out." Or, they say, "I have to make maintenance do it today or promise to do it tomorrow; otherwise, they will never do it!" So, we decentralize maintenance to provide each area with its own maintenance force. The decentralized units may report to a single maintenance manager, but they are primarily responsible for maintenance in their assigned areas. The units may even report to an operations manager. Either of these variations may coincide with each individual on the crew being responsible for a particular mac

Deming, Drucker and a case for planning and scheduling

2008-09-24T00:00:00-05:00

A case for a structured planning approach revolves around W. Edwards Deming's work in the 1950s and Peter Drucker's work in the 1960s. America initially rejected Deming, who then became the force behind Japan's colossal turnaround into a world industry leader. America reveres Drucker as fostering the Management by Objective (MBO) movement. Maintenance work involves working on the same equipment repeatedly, so that obviously lends itself to Deming's teachings of continuous improvement. Maintenance also inherently offers opportunities for goals, meaning Drucker's work applies to better maintenance success.

The appropriate structure for planning work is a cycle of continuous improvement. A planner reviews feedback from previous maintenance work and makes improvements to existing plans for the next time. This opportunity exists for every piece of equipment. The only requirement for a company to implement this system is to provide a planner that looks at jobs before they start and applies pr

'Ja, maar' mentality can hurt planning

2008-07-07T16:00:38-05:00

While working this April in Holland, I saw a plant utilizing a marvelous Dutch phrase: "Ja, maar", which means "Yes, but ..." Seeing it first-hand helps me understand a principle of successful planning. Many plants can't implement successful planning because they assign the planners many worthwhile activities that are not planning. "Yes, planning is supposed to really help us, but we need the planner to do this other thing that really helps us." Ja, maar.

What is planning? Planning establishes initial job plans for maintenance work and improves these plans over time using feedback. The craft and time estimates allow scheduling a goal of work for each week matching available crew labor hours. This goal greatly improves productivity. Thus, planning provides a huge boost to crew productivity through helping better coordinate maintenance work.

Figu

Best ways to kill planning, scheduling

2008-05-12T00:00:00-05:00

Two ways to kill a planning and scheduling system dwarf all other methods. Be careful with these two schemes. They will make everyone either mad or frustrated. They will also leave management bewildered after it puts them into play. These methods are the perfect job plan and schedule compliance.

The first method, the perfect job plan, is easy to implement and usually wounds all players, leaving nothing in place for use of the second strategy. Management simply proclaims loudly to the mechanics, "Now that we have maintenance planning, no mechanics will ever have to waste time looking for parts or other information because the planner will have provided a job plan for each job." Simple, huh? Of course, we know this is impossible, as do the planners and mechanics. Management also knows this is impossible. That's why it implemented the strategy - to ensure planning dies a slow, lingering death. The whole thing is so subtle that it boggles the mind.

Management has been to

Schedule success drives behavior

2008-04-03T00:00:00-05:00

Let's continue our discussion on the principles that guide world-class planning and scheduling. This article covers the application of schedule compliance.

First, we use the term "schedule success" to discuss "schedule compliance." Why does this make a difference? "Compliance" makes it sound like supervisors are responsible for whether or not they comply with the schedule. It makes it sound like they could increase schedule compliance simply by sticking to their guns and doing the scheduled work. Companies go so far as to tie supervisor pay to schedule compliance to show their strong support. Instead of "compliance," this leads to "stress" and supervisors with ulcers.

Place yourself into the role of a supervisor whose pay is tied to schedule compliance. You are working away through the week when a plant emergency occurs. You need to take your entire crew to head this one off and bring the plant back on line. Let's go. No! Wait just a minute. You now realize that if you drop the

Crew supervisors rule daily schedule

2008-02-25T00:00:00-06:00

My preceding Reliable Plant columns presented the six principles of planning and then started presenting the six principles of scheduling, now to arrive at the fifth scheduling principle. These principles have built onto each other, finally arriving in the last column at the creation of the weekly schedule. Nevertheless, each principle points out concepts that can help any planning organization on its own. This is even truer of the fifth principle, which states that the planning group does not create the daily schedule. How about that? The planners aren't involved with the daily schedule. More precisely, this principle gives control of the daily schedule to the crew supervisor.

This transfer of responsibility is primarily due to the uncertain nature of individual job estimates made by the planners. Maintenance work isn't assembly line work where industrial standards for motion and actions can precisely determine time estimates for individual work orders. Many maintenan

Week is enough for advance schedule

2007-11-05T00:00:00-06:00

The key period for advance scheduling of routine maintenance is only a single week. This does not mean that the plant engineers and managers do not have longer-term projects under way and are not looking at maintenance strategy several months or years in advance. It also does not mean that the plant does not plan lengthy shutdowns in great detail. But after the glory of the shutdown fades, plants need to consider productivity of routine, day-in and day-out maintenance. Down in the trenches, where the crews, supervisors and planners live, a single week is all that it takes to control productivity of routine maintenance.

As in most walks of life, setting goals helps achieve results. In routine maintenance, plants tend not to give this enough attention as long as maintenance seems responsive to urgent plant needs. They do not have a clear goal of maintenance productivity. Unfortunately, management noticing only maintenance responsiveness leads to maintenance organizing its efforts around q

Is It OK to break the schedule?

2007-08-21T00:00:00-05:00

In my previous columns, I've outlined the overall benefits of planning and scheduling as well as my six principles that make planning "work." The past two columns explained scheduling as a specific element needed for productivity and identified the first principle of scheduling, needing a planned backlog. In this issue, we move on to the second of my six principles of scheduling. This principle states that both the schedule itself and the priorities of individual work orders are important.

The statement "schedules and priorities are important" seems so obvious; it's almost overkill to include it as a principle. Nevertheless, planning and scheduling isn't rocket science. It's mostly putting together a framework of commonsense ideas. Let us review why productivity suffers at the feet of these issues.

Maintenance provides operations with equipment that operates. However, when equipment breaks, maintenance swings into its secondary role to restore equipment into service. Unfortunat

Scheduling needs a planned backlog

2007-06-25T00:00:00-05:00

Having a formal scheduling method should improve wrench time dramatically. Formal scheduling answers the question "How much work should we do next week?" Scheduling is a matter of control. The responsibilities of management can be divided into Plan, Organize, Staff, Direct and Control. Unfortunately, as with most management, maintenance management does a much poorer job with the responsibility of control than with its other areas of responsibility.

The notion of control simply means comparing one's performance against a standard and making adjustments, if needed. In maintenance, we've abdicated this responsibility by not having a standard for productivity. We have expected "craft persons to work hard to keep the plant running and keep the backlog under control." This expectation is somewhat of a standard for quality, but worthless for productivity. Nearly everyone on the site knows whether we are doing a good job with plant availability, a quality standa

The need for scheduling

2007-05-22T00:00:00-05:00

Why do we need formal scheduling? This is a legitimate question. If we have already established a maintenance planning process, shouldn't we have reduced job delays? Shouldn't we have gradually found out the tools and materials required by most equipment jobs? Shouldn't jobs with planned time estimates insure that craft personnel don't spend too much time on jobs? Why do we need to invest the additional time and effort to create a formal maintenance schedule?

Unfortunately, simply having maintenance planning without scheduling does not increase wrench time (time spent actually on jobs in the field). Delays occur not only during jobs, but between jobs as well. Planning an individual job to have the proper skills, instructions, materials and tools helps reduce delays during the execution of that job, but does not directly reduce any delays between jobs. You would think that if craft personnel execute individual jobs more quickly, they would execute more jobs overall. Nonetheles

Making sense of wrench time totals

2007-03-09T00:00:00-06:00

After rambling on in the last column about what wrench time is and how to measure it, I want to reinforce how hard it is to believe wrench time could be so low. The more we understand how hard it is to believe, the more we see why the opportunity is hidden.

Thirty-five percent is a typical wrench time for a maintenance workforce. Many managers find it hard to believe that a workforce's productivity could be so low. Some time ago, Danny Mallard provided me with a numerical scenario of how hard it seems it would be to intentionally try to achieve a wrench time as low as 35 percent. Mallard is a maintenance manager at Jacksonville Electric Authority's Northside Generating Station, an electric power plant.

Consider an average technician throughout an average day (Figure 1). Beginning a 10-hour maintenance shift, the technician first took 30 minutes to get started in the morning. This was essentially a check-in time where the crew met and the technician had a cup of coffe

The what, why, how of wrench time

2007-02-12T00:00:00-06:00

Let us share a few words about wrench time: What is it? Why is it important? And, how do we measure it?

What is wrench time? Wrench time is a measure of crafts personnel at work, using tools, in front of jobs. Wrench time does not include obtaining parts, tools or instructions, or the travel associated with those tasks. It does not include traveling to or from jobs. It does not include time spent obtaining work assignments. Obviously, it does not include break time. These non-wrench time tasks are often necessary to get work done, but are not "wrench time." The craftsperson is in a delay situation. We should also ask ourselves whether the crafts personnel perform tasks efficiently while they are on tools in front of jobs. This is a legitimate question, but not answered by wrench time. Nonetheless, if we increase the time employees are "on the job," we should get more work done.

In addition, planning should increase the efficiency of a craftsperson while on a job i

How much detail for job plans?

2006-11-03T00:00:00-05:00

This column continues the discussion of how many hours a planner should plan each week. In the final analysis, the planner must vary the level of detail in job plans in order to keep up with the backlog and stay ahead of the scheduling process. Thus, my fifth principle of planning states that plans recognize the skill of the crafts.

Consider 10 jobs. The planner must not spend so much time planning three jobs that seven do not get planned at all. Those seven would not get the benefit of past learning because the planner never reviewed their files, and the scheduling process would have difficulty including them without time estimates or craft skills. We would rather have the planner plan all 10 jobs to support the scheduling process.

Detailed procedures and checklists contribute to better reliability. Less is left to chance and technician memory. Yet, planners frequently do not have the time to plan thorough step-by-step procedures in time to support scheduling. The plant could

Planned hours: What's a good total?

2006-08-23T00:00:00-05:00

A few weeks ago, someone asked me, “How many hours should a planner plan for each week?” This is a great question, but I can only give a touchy-feely answer.

I’m hesitant to push planners into a numerical-type standard or quota. But, let’s first try to analyze this in a quantitative manner. A single planner should be able to plan for 20 to 30 technicians. Therefore, a planner needs to stay ahead of at least 20 techs on an ongoing basis. As a minimum, there needs to be enough planned work available at the end of the week to enable scheduling for the next week. This could mean as much as 800 hours planned (20 techs times 40 hours per week). However, the plant’s preventive maintenance program also should be generating work orders that don’t need advance planning. Presume the plant wants to spend 20 percent of hours on PM tasks. That subtracts 160 hours and suggests each planner should plan 640 hours of work per week.

A variable that would increase the weekly planning hours is if t

What makes a good planner?

2006-07-13T00:00:00-05:00

I can’t overemphasize the importance of selecting the right person to be a maintenance planner. Controlling the entire planning effort relies on staffing, period. At stake is a 1.57-fold increase in workforce efficiency. Planners function as respected professionals making highly independent judgments one after the other based on their skills and experience. These skills include craft skills, people skills and data skills. A company can usually find a few of these people. However, making them want to be planners can be a challenge.

This article doesn’t delve into the benefit of planning. Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to mention it. Work coordination from planning increases wrench time from the 35 percent of a typical good maintenance force to as much as 55 percent. Fifty-five percent divided by 35 percent yields a 1.57 improvement. This means 30 people with planned and scheduled work could perform the work of 47 people (30 x 1.57 = 47). Hence, investing in a single

Accurately estimating labor hours

2006-05-31T00:00:00-05:00

One of the principles of effective planning involves how best to estimate the labor hours for a job plan. It turns out that the simple opinion of a skilled technician is preferred over complex methods such as using industrial engineering standards or methods such as averaging past job performance.

The chore of estimating labor hours for a job is a serious planning issue. It can consume so much time that planners can’t keep up and leave unplanned work at the time of scheduling. We must have estimates of labor hours to support scheduling and promote productivity.

Planners struggle too much over developing an accurate estimate for each job. Many managers expect planners to develop perfect time estimates. They may even grade technicians and planners on actual field performance vs. the estimates. As a result, planners agonize over the estimates to the point where they don’t get all the jobs planned; even the ones planned still aren’t “accurate.”

File at the component level

2006-03-13T00:00:00-05:00

My previous columns outlined common frustrations with planning and the value of planning. They also provided an overall listing of the main principles that make planning effective. This column continues to dissect the principles of successful planning by exploring how planners should file information. (This is Principle 3 from my “Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook”.)

Management first rescues planners from working on field crews and then from spending all their time helping jobs-in-progress so they can focus on planning future work. Future work is work not yet started or assigned. At this point, planners encounter a new issue: what level of equipment or system to file information from completed work.

Imagine a condensate polisher (Figure 1).

Inside the Toyota MR-50

2006-03-13T00:00:00-05:00

"Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent" is a lofty goal, but who is going to bet against this automaker?

The Georgetown, Ky., plant makes the Camry four-door
sedan, Avalon sedan, and the Solara coupe and convertible.

How are your company’s numbers? For comparison sake, here are some of Toyota’s:

3 - its rank on the list of the world’s most respected companies, based on the results from a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers and Financial Times poll.

5 - its rank on the list of the world’s most admired companies (No. 1 among automobile manufacturers), as selected by 10,000 executives in a survey by Fortune magazine.

6 - its rank in Harris Interactive’s study on the world’s best brands.

10 - its rank in Harris’ corporate reputation survey (again, first among car makers).

Maintenance management legends

2006-02-01T00:00:00-06:00

There are many paradigms and legends surrounding maintenance management in plants. Often, the legends are known to be untrue, but people live with them because it is politically correct, or simply convenient. To be successful in improving equipment reliability and maintenance management, plants must break the legends that exist in their organizations. Some of the legends will be addressed in this article. You may find that these legends are uncomfortably close to describing how your plant operates.

Legend 1: Maintenance cost must be reduced quickly
Plants should reduce maintenance cost. But there are many variables that can be affected by lowering the maintenance budget. It is, therefore, important to consider how the cost cut is implemented.

Most of us can cut maintenance costs in any plant in the world very quickly by 40 percent. We simply get rid of some people and stop doing certain maintenance jobs. If you get the opportunity to take a job like this, d

Planning: What's in it for you?

2006-01-05T00:00:00-06:00

What is the value of planning and scheduling maintenance work? It depends on who is asking the question. Are you a technician, a crew supervisor, a plant manager or a company?

Technician
Enlightened maintenance technicians welcome planning for a few reasons. First, technicians gain their own file clerks. No longer do they have to keep tidbits of technical information in their lockers or memories. They simply write down information on job plans as feedback and the planners include it on future plans for the same equipment. The planners keep a file for every piece of equipment. In a plant with thousands of devices, technicians need the services of a competent file clerk.

Advances in plant maintenance often result from little lessons of the past. The lesser technicians simply can’t keep up with the minute details. The better technicians have a wealth of this information stored in their minds. The planner as file clerk can put

Morning meetings: Maintenance planning and scheduling

2006-01-03T00:00:00-06:00

All over the world, most plants have morning meetings. As a consultant, I have been asked to sit in on many of these meetings, and my conclusion from these experiences is that most of them are not very effective or meaningful to the attendees.

First of all, the focus of the meetings is often on past events. For example, each department reports what happened yesterday, and very little time is spent on today's plans. In addition, even less time is spent on activities that must take place tomorrow and beyond.

The worst-case scenario

Follow these planning, scheduling principles

2005-11-11T00:00:00-06:00

In the first two issues of Reliable Plant, I outlined why planning frustrates many companies and why many planners do not plan. I explained that serious frustration stems from incorrectly encouraging supervisors to wait on planning for all reactive work. I also wrote that planners commonly help jobs in progress to the extent that they have no time left to plan new work.

With these major issues addressed, this column enumerates all of the principles of a successful planning and scheduling program. The six planning principles and six scheduling principles listed on this page form the essence of my “Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook”.

Planning Principle 1 requires keeping planners independent from the supervision of the individual crews. Supervisors commonly grab planners to help on jobs, making them unavailable for planning.

Planning Principle 2 is to have the planners (now available for planning) concentrate on pla

Constructing an Effective Maintenance Plan

2005-10-26T00:00:00-05:00

Learn what makes the difference between an ordinary maintenance plan and a good, effective maintenance program.

Time zones create planning lag

2005-09-16T00:00:00-05:00

A primary reason that planning fails is that planners do not plan! They do not have time to plan because they are in the wrong time zone.

Figure 1 shows the cycle of maintenance improvement possible through maintenance planning. First, a planner plans a job. Then, a technician works the job. During the job, the technician learns something. The technician records this information as feedback. The next time the job occurs, the planner uses the feedback to improve the job plan.The next technician receives a better job plan. Productivity and quality improve each time the planner improves the plan.

For example, a pipe flange leaks and a planner plans to break the flange and replace the gasket. On the job later, the technician breaks the spool at both ends. The technician learns that the job really needed two gaskets and records this as feedback. Si

What constitutes world-class maintenance and reliability?

2005-09-02T00:00:00-05:00

I have received many calls asking, "How can you tell if you are a world-class maintenance and reliability organization, or not?"

How well the systems and practices discussed in this column are being used indicate to me how far a plant has to go to become world class in the areas of maintenance and reliability. I would suggest reading this column with a group of operations and maintenance employees that includes both management and craftspeople.

On a scale of zero to 10, rate your plant's use of the following systems and practic

What kind of job plan is that?

2005-08-05T00:00:00-05:00

Although planning and scheduling is somewhat of an intricate process that we will spend future issues of Reliable Plant examining and discussing, I wanted to spend this very first issue going right to the area of frustration within many existing planning programs. The key frustration comes ultimately from crew supervisors being told not to work unplanned jobs.

A crew must respond immediately to a breakdown to restore critical equipment to service. But the job has not been planned yet! If the crew waits to repair the equipment, the supervisor takes a hit. On the other hand, if the crew works without a planned job, the supervisor takes a hit. It does not help that the planner takes a hit as well for not providing a plan in time. This is the definition of frustration and stress.

The plant should allow the supervisors to start truly urgent jobs without plans, but also instruct the planner on how to plan reactive jobs in time.