Turnaround season is approaching for many organizations. Volatile markets, unit additions and more have contributed to an increase in maintenance projects for 2016. If time and effort are to be saved on the job, then time and effort must be put into the planning process. Planning is the most important part of any integrated maintenance policy involving limited resources in time-critical activities.
Some people use the word plan synonymously with the word intend. They say, “I plan to do that.” However, identifying work to be done and intending to do it is not the definition of planning in the context of maintenance.
Planning, with respect to industrial maintenance, can be defined as “determining the proper methods, manpower, materials and other resources for efficient and effective job execution.” Planning is the effort that is put into a work order before it is assigned to a craftsperson.
There are five main reasons to plan work:
- Eliminate or reduce uncertainty: New machinery or processes require routine work and activities that may be unknown or unfamiliar to a maintenance staff. A predefined plan can prepare individuals for the tasks at hand rather than subject them to an unknown and unfamiliar environment. A predefined, long-range plan eliminates the uncertainty associated with trying to predict when maintenance is needed; indications and parameters can be well established and specified.
- Improve efficiency, effectiveness and safety: Preplanning any effort improves the efficiency of the individuals performing the tasks as well as the ability to plan for similar work in the future. Preplanning helps to minimize delays and improve outage work efforts.
- Obtain a better understanding of the scope, risks and potential delays: Without planning in advance, craftspeople go out to start jobs; discover additional requirements such as scaffolding, electrical work or parts requirements; and encounter several delays in the job. Without planning, workers start jobs and then discover many additional problems once the equipment is down, requiring additional parts or materials that were not anticipated. However, with proper planning, the scope, risks and potential delays can be better known and contingency plans can be put in place in advance.
- Enable improvements through learning: Planners cannot plan the perfect job. Often not enough time is allotted to them in order to achieve perfect job plans. Some jobs require a minimal amount of planning because the planner respects the ability of the crafts to do repetitive and well-known jobs. Other jobs — perhaps those that are more complex, involve higher risks or are done infrequently — require more rigorous planning. In both cases, having the work orders returned with information from the craftspeople is vital to improving the quality of job plans.
- Enable scheduling in advance: Without effort in the planning process, schedules would be entirely unworkable. Without planning, jobs would have no estimated timeframes, making a schedule impossible to create in the first place. Secondly, without planning, craftspeople encounter so many delays that schedules inevitably go awry and provide no value.
The cost of maintenance continues to rise. Some estimates place the annual rise at near 15 percent. To remain profitable, many companies are asking their maintenance organizations to keep machinery running longer with fewer people, reduce failures, implement new programs, continuously improve and do so at reduced cost. This can only be accomplished if the maintenance organization is efficient and effective.
Professional application of planning and scheduling concepts is a critical maintenance business practice for achieving and maintaining a “world-class” status for any maintenance organization. Planners provide significant benefits to a maintenance organization, but they cannot do it on their own. People all throughout the organization — operations, maintenance workers, contractors, supervisors, spare parts — impact the planning and scheduling function.
For more information, contact Ken Arthur at (813) 569-4043 or email karthur@gpstrategies.com.
