Planning and Scheduling: Planners Should Not

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. A strict numerical approach to productivity might miss the point of why planners exist (to promote crew productivity). I want the planner to keep the unplanned backlog under control by adjusting the time spent on the level of detail put into each job plan.

Manufacturing facilities know downtime is money.  Every hour you are offline for a shutdown is costly from both lost revenue and cost of the workforce employed to maintain the facility. This article will discuss the 5 steps to Best Practices that will optimize your shutdown program.

Effective shutdown management is critical to the operation of mills, for without well-planned and executed shutdowns, equipment reliability suffers, and the mill pays the price in poor quality and lost production. Becoming proficient at managing shutdowns is a way to reduce overall downtime costs so that shutdowns themselves do not consume the savings they are capable of generating.

If you need to implement a new planning and scheduling program, you’re probably discovering that the task can be rather daunting. But there are ways to achieve an environment that will support a planning and scheduling program that works with what you already have in place and takes into account what your team is able to manage throughout implementation and beyond. If you take a closer look at what you already have, putting the final touches on a successful planning and scheduling program may not really be that big a beast to tackle.

ONCE UPON A TIME in a maintenance department, a work order woke up in the morning, feeling very lazy, unable to open his eyes or get up to walk. It's been a long time for him in the same room, nobody knocks on the door to say hello, how are you, or to release him so he can show his presence. He looks in the mirror and finds he has changed a lot since being created and kept in the backlog. Looking at gray hair covering his head, he tries to remember his lifecycle since that day when he became a pending order waiting for spare parts to arrive. This spurred his friends to give him the nickname, "Nomat."

To actually realize potential increases in profits, maintenance must be taken a step further through planning and scheduling. In addition to identifying potential failures, we must also focus our resources to correct them before the failure occurs. With decreasing workforces and increasing responsibilities of those left at the facility, the efficiency of our resources easily becomes a second priority.

Standard job plans. Be sure your CMMS systems have a way to put in a standard job. That true? yeah? Okay, so Tor mentioned yesterday critical and repetitive work...great place to start and even on a repetitive job it may be something that's really simple but if there's a bill of materials that comes with that job, then you create a standard job plan that just has the bill of material, has the work order coding on it, and another CMMS system that we had at my last job you could actually link the standard job to an equipment number in the background so when you went in to create a work order you just put in the equipment number there's a standard job pull down every standard job that was linked to that equipment select it and create your work order.