What are some maintenance planning best practices?
The Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Map
Tools such as a balanced scorecard and strategy map can help companies better understand how to align maintenance planning goals with overall business goals. By outlining the steps a facility can take to improve its overall planning, a plant can not only reap the benefits of a strong scheduling program, but also illustrate how these results positively impact the entire company.
Start by learning how your plant measures its financial performance so that you can align maintenance measurements to the same objectives. In some cases, this may mean improving your preventive maintenance program, increasing your training offerings, or revamping your planning and scheduling procedures. Once those activities are identified, you'll need to figure out what tools and technology may be required to implement the program. Finally, you have to have a good idea of the financial investment required and what the return on investment will be for the company. Being able to communicate those components will be critical to achieving buy-in from the management team.
A balanced scorecard and a strategy map can help you measure all these items. The scorecard looks at financial, production, maintenance processes, and people resources. The strategy plan, on the other hand, is based on a series of cause and effect relationships. For example, if maintenance team is given the training and tools it needs, the team can improve processes and asset performance. This improved performance will then decrease downtime of your production line, which leads to increase productivity and higher revenues.
Benefits of Best-Practice Planning and Scheduling
By implementing best practice planning and scheduling procedures, many individuals within your organization will benefit.
Maintenance Technician
As maintenance technicians perform their daily jobs, they accumulate small bits of information that can help them with future similar projects. However, without organized planning, all this information is not communicated with other teammates. Planners essentially serve as bridges of communication, compiling all the feedback from various job tickets, coding and filing these lessons as standardized operating procedures, and providing this information to the entire teams of technicians for future use.
Crew Supervisor
In some organizations, a crew supervisor may be asked to do some planning. However, in these cases, that planning work tends to take away from the more important job of supervising technicians. Having a team member dedicated to planning essentially gives crew supervisors more control over the workload. Crew supervisors no longer need to scan all open work before assigning the jobs for the day because a planner can provide a weekly schedule. As a result, a crew supervisor has fewer jobs to prioritize and assign.
Plant Manager
A best-practice planning program gives plant managers the high-level, transparent information they need help to manage maintenance productivity. They can easily see how much maintenance work was expected to be done in any given week and whether it was enough to handle emergencies. A plant manager can see whether the maintenance staff was able to complete the scheduled amount of work. If they failed, the plant manager can use planning data to drill down and find out the reason why. Once those reasons are discovered, better business decisions can be made for the future.
Characteristics of a Great Planner
If you're ready to hire a planner or evaluate your current planning position, you may want to consider these critical characteristics for such a position.
Experience
Before individuals get put into planning positions, they need to have developed technical skills and a mature level of experience. The best planners will have between 10 years and 20 years of experience working in the same area that they will be planning. This history will help them put together more effective and efficient plans for the entire organization.
Understand Planning Principles
Planners should learn the basic principles and theories of planning through either training seminars or independent study. These theories will help planners better coordinate job orders and integrate planning activities into the big picture on a day-to-day basis.
People Person
Planners must be able to work well with a wide variety of people, including maintenance technicians, reliability professionals, purchasing staff, and operations personnel. Without the buy-in and active participation from these individuals, even the best plan cannot be successful.
Ordered Thinking and Communication
Planning obviously requires strong logical and critical thinking skills. Planners must be able to assimilate a great deal of disparate information to create order. In addition, planners must be able to communicate their suggestions effectively to all those who are involved in their execution as well as to management teams concerned about the bottom line.
Maintenance Planning in Practice: MillerCoors Case Study
The challenge
As the third-largest beer brewer in the country, MillerCoors runs its facility around the clock every day of the year. Its production process from raw materials and ingredients to shipped six-packs requires complex processes in a tightly-linked manufacturing line. Breakdowns cause significant production delays and downtime.
Although the company implemented many improvements initiatives, such as reliability-centered maintenance, preventive and predictive maintenance, and root cause analysis, MillerCoors still found major problems looming at its plants.
The company soon realized that it wasn't embracing best-practice planning and scheduling processes. MillerCoors planners often just looked at work orders and passed them along. They spent a great deal of time finding and dealing with replacement parts to deal with breakdowns. The company realized they needed to shift from a reactive maintenance mode to a more proactive one.
The solution
First, they began by ensuring they had the right number of planners in place. The company decided to employ one planner for every 15 to 18 technicians and limit their tasks to a specific area. The goal was to keep planners on planning tasks and not get pulled into emergency, administrative, or other tangential work.
The company then began scheduling downtime more regularly throughout the year. In the past, MillerCoors would run their equipment nearly constantly for an entire year and scheduled maintenance during the holidays. However, this led to significant breakdowns that brought down production lines throughout the year for emergency maintenance.
Although technicians and operations staff were initially worried about not having enough resources to deal with breakdowns, they soon learned that planned and scheduled downtimes were much more efficient and effective in reducing and eliminating problems.
The results of implementing maintenance planning best practices at MillersCoors
The company has reaped significant rewards for its efforts. By implementing world-class planning and scheduling procedures, MillerCoors has increased its planned maintenance activities from 30% of its maintenance workload to more than 60%. MillerCoors has also seen an increase in the completed preventive maintenance work. For example, in its forklift area, the company's completion rate rose from rose to 82% from 31% in less than a year and a half.
Overall the company has seen a drop in costs, better reliability, and more stability throughout the production process.
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Some of the best practices your maintenance planners should use include:
• Basing decisions on data
• Prioritizing tasks with reliability in mind
• Making sure materials are available
• Getting out of the office
• Striving for continuous improvement
In addition, planners should follow six guiding principles, seven performance pillars, and use tools such as the balanced scorecard to guide their daily work. This article also shares the characteristics of a great planner, benefits from the process, and a real-life case study application of MillerCoors and its maintenance planning best practices.
Base Decisions on Data
When planning maintenance tasks, planners need to base their decisions on data. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is central to tracking this data, but you need to make sure you’re actually using the information you’re gathering.
Some of the key performance indicators you’ll want to track for maintenance planning include preventive maintenance schedule compliance, ratio of emergency work orders to planned tasks, work order backlog, and mean-time to repair.
Using this data will help you assign the right priorities to tasks, avoid false prioritization, and see where work processes might be streamlined.
Prioritize Tasks to Support Reliability
Tasks should be prioritized in order to support reliability. This means that work orders involving non-critical equipment or unlikely failures shouldn’t be as high priority as those that involve critical assets. Basically, you should focus preventive maintenance efforts towards reducing failures that represent a significant risk to your operations. Short of emergencies, everything else is secondary.
Make Sure Materials are Available Onsite
Another best practice is making sure your maintenance technicians are properly equipped for each job. This means making sure the needed tools and replacement parts are available on-site before assigning the task.
In addition to replacement parts and tools, you should arrange for your technicians to have any relevant manuals and schematics in hand before they head out to the job site. Additionally, they should be able to access this information on a mobile device.
Get Out of the Office
In terms of the planning process, note that maintenance planning is not strictly setting a schedule. It’s not a desk job—your maintenance planner should be out on-site looking at the equipment. That way, they’ll be fully aware of any potential issues that could complicate the job, such as access or safety problems.
Strive for Continuous Improvement
Maintenance planners should be getting feedback from your technicians on each work order. If there are any issues with scheduling, time estimates, or materials, they should be made aware of those.
As they receive feedback, they should (naturally) implement it. This way, they can eliminate prior mistakes and make improvements the next time similar tasks come up.
6 Maintenance Planning Principles
According to Reliable Plant, the purpose of maintenance planning is to identify the tasks and prepare them for scheduling. We've listed the top 6 key maintenance planning principles to guide a planner in developing a work plan for each request.
1. Remain a Stand-Alone Individual
Because planners have to be focused on future projects, they must be separated from the maintenance crew. If they are not, it is very easy for planners to be pulled in as extra technicians on emergency projects or as runners for current work.
2. Maintain a Future Focus
Planners should be working on tasks that are expected to be needed two weeks out. After they create their plans, those should be given to maintenance managers for the upcoming week’s schedule. Once the plan has been handed over, the maintenance supervisor and technicians must deal with any issues that arise. At this point, the planner should be focused on the next future project.
3. Create Mini-Files
As planners create individual documents for work plans, they should keep their information organized by mini-file or at the component level. This organizational system will allow planners to build up useful data over time, incorporating feedback from the maintenance crew to be accessed the next time the job comes around.
4. Estimate Time Reasonably
Since businesses must rely on planners to create reasonable time estimates for jobs, planners must have 10 to 15 years of experience to draw upon. For example, if an entry-level technician takes 10 hours to complete a task, but the planner knows that an experienced team member can finish the same task in half the time, this latter estimate should be used.
5. Tailor Plans to Skill Levels
Planners should be responsible for creating plans for a set number of technicians. Planners should know these technicians and their skill levels well, so they can outline the scope of work and the strategy to match those skill levels. Down the road, planners can work with their team of technicians to improve procedures and processes.
6. Take Work Samples
By measuring wrench time, planners can determine how much more efficient technicians are working. When work is planned out, technicians generally experience fewer delays during and between jobs.
7 Performance Pillars in Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
World-class experts in planning and scheduling adhere to the seven pillars of performance to implement best practices in this area.
1. Evaluating Preventive Maintenance Checklists
The first pillar of performance is to evaluate all existing preventive maintenance tasks for the value they add to your team and assets. Tasks often accumulate over the years and might be difficult to interpret in a standard way, or simply fail to add value. All tasks that remain should be rewritten in an active voice that requires a technician to check and perform an action, or check and confirm something.
2. Designing Work Orders
Since a work order summarizes all the critical details for performing the required maintenance, it must be complete, accurate and easy to read. A work order should include a clear description, accurate location, accountable technician, and clear instructions. It should also include data on safety, parts required, and tools needed. When technicians read a work order, they should know exactly when to start and finish the process as well as have adequate fields and space to report the work completed and other issues that may arise in the process.
3. Developing Work Plans
Outside of preventive maintenance work orders, a company should also develop a work plan that studies major breakdown issues. This third pillar is really about the tasks associated with planning for a future project by learning from past mistakes and breakdowns. It requires the same level of detail and accuracy as the work orders.
4. Staging Inventory
Having a good handle on MRO inventory means understanding what parts are required to maintain critical assets and how frequently those items must be ordered. Best practices as they relate to managing MRO inventory have to do with understanding this rate of usage. When a business has this information, it can negotiate purchasing discounts with key suppliers, as well as improve the efficiency of staging future maintenance tasks.
5. Dynamic Scheduling
Any maintenance department will tell you that even the best schedule can be difficult to maintain on a daily basis. There always seems to be unexpected emergencies that come up that require attention. Planners that are working toward best practices try to schedule about 80% of the workday, leaving the remaining time for unplanned tasks as well as backlog issues. The availability of maintenance staff, equipment, tools, and parts plays a key role in the ever-dynamic nature of scheduling.
6. Monitoring Performance
The real benefit of collecting maintenance-related data is to learn from the past. Companies with accurate failure histories, parts consumption, contractor performance, or product quality, could better plan for the future. This data provides the evidence needed to justify changes in terms of processes or procedures, which can then promote greater efficiency and productivity in the future.
7. Standardizing Processes
The ultimate goal of these best practices is to create standardized processes. The standard workflows and procedures that develop can help train new maintenance technicians, as well as refresh current staff. They essentially provide a roadmap and prevent an organization from needing to reinvent the wheel down the road.