Planning & Scheduling

Planning & Scheduling

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Basics

Planning and scheduling functions are the key deliverables of the planning role. This is where the most gains in execution have the potential to be made and acted upon. In some larger organisations these are split, allowing more adequate resources for each role. The difference between planning and scheduling needs to be clear within each company. These are differing areas worthy of differing measurement and improvement initiatives.

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Maintenance Management

Optimizing your Shutdown Program in 5 Steps

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.

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Planning & Scheduling

Planning and Scheduling in the Process Industry

Since there has been tremendous progress in planning and scheduling in the process industry during the last 20 years, it might be worthwhile to give an overview of the current state-of-the-art of planning and scheduling problems in the chemical process industry. This is the purpose of the current review.

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Planning & Scheduling

The Pitfalls of Planning and Scheduling

World-class organizations would not—could not—succeed without implementing an efficient and effective planning and scheduling process. It’s one of those cornerstone processes that can transform your organization into “Best-in-Class.” Here are some of the pitfalls regarding the deployment of Planners/Schedulers (Planners) that can keep you from getting where you want to be.

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Planning & Scheduling

Accurately Estimating Labor Hours

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.”

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Planning & Scheduling

Backlog Management

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.

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Planning & Scheduling

Cutting Maintenance Cost Through Better Planning and Scheduling

Cutting costs has become a high priority, due to the recent economic conditions. Maintenance shutdowns are a major part of the annual budget at most mills, and are usually a target for cost reduction. Maintenance shutdown costs can be reduced by 30-50 percent from historical levels, with start up after the outage occurring smoothly and predictably. Using simple and effective shutdown management techniques can result in such improvements, creating savings equal to several weeks of additional production each year. This can be done without sacrificing any work, or canceling any scheduled downtime.

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Planning & Scheduling

Improve Basic Work Systems First

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.

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Planning & Scheduling

Improving Estimating Quality

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.

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