Focus on Reliability

Jeff Shiver, CMRP

Recent Posts by Jeff Shiver, CMRP:

What is the Maintenance Planner Role? A Comprehensive Guide

A maintenance planner's job is a crucial part of any successful maintenance and reliability program. Maintenance planners have a lead role in ensuring that all equipment and machinery is properly maintained, repaired, and, if necessary, replaced in a timely manner.

Topics: Maintenance Management Maintenance Planning Scheduling Maintenance Planner

The Best Learning Method for You

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Seemingly overnight, the challenges for the maintenance function intensified.  Some organizations faced reduced sales and product demand, pushing the organizations to reduce budgetary spend. Meanwhile, others have pivoted with new products or increased production demand requirements.  In either case, the need to improve performance and maintain reduced costs remains a strong focus.

From my experience, there are no better tools than education and the use of a guide to coach people to implement a proactive maintenance organization focused on improving performance and reducing cost. The use of one should lead to the use of the second in tandem.

At People and Processes, Inc., we are pleased to provide effective solutions for both.  In the table below, you can see the advantages and disadvantages of different training approaches. Currently, we offer both the instructor-led classroom and virtual interactive training courses. We are also developing the on-demand eLearning training courses as well.

So, what is the best learning method for you?

Activity Instructor-Led Classroom Training Virtual Interactive Instructor-Led Training On-Demand eLearning

Instructor access to answer questions and facilitate the discussions for learning

Advantage of real-time immediate access and visual feedback

Advantage of real-time immediate access and feedback but cannot see faces of peers in large groups due to bandwidth limits.  Using our technology platform, attendees can interact in main areas and in breakout rooms. The instructor can interact in all areas.

Disadvantage due to time-differences and schedules due to on-demand nature. It may be hours before receiving answers or feedback.

Peer-to-peer networking and learning

Advantage due to sharing of physical space, visual cues, and group interactions.

Advantage due to break-out rooms and interactive tools enable one-on-one and group interactions.

Disadvantage as above and attendees are left to initiate the desired levels of interaction outside of course requirements.

Travel expense

Potential disadvantage if travel costs are incurred to an on-site location for attendees. Instructor travel is a potential cost.

Advantage as the training can be attended from any location using a laptop and high-speed internet.

Advantage as the training can be attended from any location using a laptop and high-speed internet.

Engagement of learner and transfer of knowledge

Advantage due to adult learning concepts, interactive exercises, and gamification

Advantage due to adult learning concepts, interactive exercises, and gamification. Potential disadvantage as not everyone learns well in this approach. Engagement can suffer with competing priorities and learner may focus on gaining minimal knowledge to complete the module assessments to advance through course.

Time commitment

Fixed amount including potential travel

Fixed - typically, less time is required over classroom training, especially without the travel considerations to an on-site location. Self-paced flexibility based on individual motivation.

 

Check out our upcoming Virtual Interactive Instructor-Led Courses Here

Live Virtual Interactive Instructor-Led Courses | People and Processes, Inc.

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People and Processes, Inc. is announcing interactive live virtual interactive instructor-led classes for people working in maintenance and reliability across industry.

Many of our reliability training and service offerings have traditionally depended on travel to public venues or sharing physical space on the client sites.  With the newer digital landscape, we have been tirelessly working to create solutions that enable our clients to attend our courses from anywhere they have a digital connection. As our overseas clients have been asking for the same access for some time, we had planned to introduce these offerings later this year.  We are excited to announce that we have accelerated our efforts and pulled the course launches forward.

Two of the most popular classes, our Maintenance Planning and Scheduling course, is scheduled for April 28-30,2020 and our Maintenance Storerooms and Materials Management course is scheduled for May 7-9,2020.  For these course dates, we are offering a 45% reduction in the standard course fees to assist companies with their immediate training requirements. Additional courses will be added to the People and Processes, Inc. Institute website as the dates become available.

Our interactive live virtual instructor-led training combines the same course concepts developed by our industry-leading and certified practitioners found in our classroom training.  Leveraging our virtual instructor-led training enables the real-time benefits typical of classroom learning with our certified instructors combined into an interactive and engaging learning experience via your remote environment.

About People and Processes, Inc.
People and Processes, Inc. experienced practitioners provide consulting and training to improve industrial equipment maintenance and exceed your targets. The company works in all verticals to include facilities, manufacturing, mining, municipal government, universities, and water as examples. Our offerings include CMMS/EAM implementation, assessment and benchmarking, work execution management, storerooms, and RCM3. Our industry partnerships include The Aladon Network, The Reliability and Maintainability Center at the University of Tennessee (RMC-UTK) and we are a Tier 5 Approved Provider for the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP).

Contact Us

People and Processes, Inc.
Tammi Pickett, Marketing / Business Development
tpickett@peopleandprocesses.com
(843) 814-3795

The Maintenance Job Plan Outline

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If you are like many Maintenance Planners that I have the opportunity to interface with, most aren’t doing much using the job plan concept. The intent of the job plan is to better enable the craftspeople to execute their job with the materials, tools, and information in hand. Ideally, you really want a template to facilitate the development of these job plans.

What should some of the headers be for a job plan template? Here’s an outline that you may want to start with.

  • Asset number
  • Asset name
  • Crafts required
  • Estimated hours per craft
  • Total job duration (to be able to tell our Operations partners how long we need the equipment)
  • Safety considerations
  • Tasks and sequence
  • Materials and Parts (Stock or purchased)
  • Consumables (i.e. shop towels, penetrating lubricant spray)
  • Tools and equipment (i.e. 2” impact socket, grease gun, 40’ man-lift)
  • Housekeeping and/ or disposal
  • Revision history

Most of these outline items can be used regardless of whether it’s a PM or Corrective Action job plan. Is there anything else you would add?

Download your job plan outline here.

Looking for training?
 
 
Attended training but still struggling to get your planning and scheduling program off the ground?
Check out our Virtual Planner / Scheduler Development and Coaching Program

Advancing the Crafts

For many organizations, finding qualified maintenance technicians is a real challenge. While not a new problem, it is becoming much more pronounced depending on their level of pay and geographical location. More companies are looking internally with the intent of developing their own workforce to take on new responsibilities.

Topics: Training

Six Steps to build the Maintenance Schedule

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Struggling to put together a complete weekly schedule? It may surprise you, but you’re not alone.  Although the processes of work execution (preventive and predictive programs, planning, scheduling, coordination, storeroom and production partnerships) are foundational, many groups struggle to put it all together well. Without this foundation, more advanced concepts fizzle out quickly. Frustration ensues. There are many pieces that need to align to complete the entire work execution puzzle. To start, let's focus on developing the weekly maintenance schedule. There are some basic steps that you should address to move things forward.

Topics: Maintenance Management Maintenance Planning Scheduling

Focus on Reliability | Maintenance Backlog | The Goldilocks Principle

understanding maintenance backlog conceptsWelcome to another guest post from our friend, Trent Phillips.

Topics: Planning and Scheduling Maintenance Management CMMS/ EAM Maintenance Planning Scheduling

Focus on Reliability |Safety Work Orders | Should all have Top Priority?

establishing maintenance work order priority with safety items

We pleased this week to have a guest blogger to provide insights to the People and Processes Focus on Reliability blog.  Please welcome my good friend, Trent Phillips from Novelis.  With this post, Trent addresses a common topic that I frequently hear almost everywhere.

Topics: Planning and Scheduling Maintenance Management CMMS/ EAM Maintenance Planning Scheduling

Maintenance Planning Scheduling - The Scheduling Meeting

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When it comes to the weekly Maintenance Scheduling meeting, I generally see two separate spectrums.  The first is no meeting or no attendees, and ultimately, no real schedule.  On the opposite end, I see the long drawn out review of the entire backlog, most of which we don’t have materials for or resources to do in the current week. That might be OK if you have very little backlog.  Most don’t.  I believe you would agree that we spend way too much time in meetings reviewing the same items week after week.

Topics: Planning and Scheduling