Maintenance Planning in Underground Mining Operations

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.

Estimating lays the foundation for planning, scheduling, and management of business critical projects. It is also critical for budgeting, bidding and contracting. Achieving consistent, quality estimates is critical to business success. However, many companies lack systems and procedures to ensure consistency in estimating across the enterprise and easily define, benchmark, and refine corporate estimating standards. The potential long term benefits of instituting an effective solution to this problem are enormous.

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?

Many organizations spend too much time searching for—and starting implementation of—new reliability and maintenance concepts, and very little time on implementation and improvements of what they just started. Let me give some examples of my own observations as they relate to the statement above. Some time ago I met with a group of supervisors, planners, and craftspeople—the front line of maintenance—in a mill.

Few tools are as useful to managing the maintenance workload and effectiveness as the Maintenance Backlog. In many companies today management of the maintenance backlog has been neglected. As a result they are generally drowning in their own data. A poorly managed system has a dramatic effect on the entire delivery of maintenance services.

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.”

It’s common knowledge that increasing the share of planned maintenance over the time spent on breakdowns should be a top priority for forward-thinking maintenance organizations. The financial benefits of that strategy, however, may not be readily apparent.