Planning and Scheduling: Planners Should Not

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.

Having the part available in the network has a huge impact on service performance. This also means choosing which parts not to hold is equally crucial, because remember, you can’t have them all. Life is about making choices. If anything, good tools will allow parts planners to present the executive team with several scenarios from which to choose. They can then make a choice based on solid calculations and foresight into cost versus service performance.

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.

Priority, as defined in the Franklin Dictionary, means "coming before in time, order, or importance." When prioritizing maintenance work, one must consider its importance to the entire company in question. My experience shows that, in the real world of most maintenance departments, you can classify priorities in two groups: Emotional priorities and real priorities.

The technical database plays a critical role as an enabler to the planning and scheduling process. The results of a poor technical database are often hidden but can be substantial. To function well, all eight components of the technical database need to be accurate, accessible, and applied during the planning and scheduling process. Benefits of complete bills of material, well labeled equipment in the field, and easy access to original equipment manufacturer procedures will lead to high quality standard job plans that are produced quickly and reliably.

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.”

Planning should be done before work is scheduled. You can say that all work is always planned before you do the work. That is a fact. The question is how efficient can this be done?