How can you turn your maintenance planners into the foundational building blocks of a world class Maintenance organization?
During various maintenance process improvement initiatives that I have been a part of over the years, the role and function performed by maintenance planners and schedulers invariably surface as an integral piece to achieving best practices.
There are maintenance groups out there right now that have not yet reached into the world Of things like reliability-centered maintenance or invested in condition-based technologies, etc…but do normally have some vestige of a Planning process (for better or worse) to insure their technicians are being given the support they need to be effective.
If we were to consider that a planner may be required to plan for the activities of 15-25 while also controlling costs and supporting overall reliability initiatives, then the competencies of those individuals need to be considered.
Planners are ideally selected from the craft roles, and shown how to use the CMMS to create work orders. Those same individuals may even have been given some training in planning principles and then put to work.
Later, it is often assessed that planning is not working well. We wonder why that could be. It has been my experience that planners need to not only be selected with care and trained initially, but also coached until a desired level of competency is achieved.
An experienced practitioner can first assess your planners against best practices. On reconciling the findings, coach them in one-on-one sessions against a standardized and scored framework in subjects like:
- Estimating
- Job Plan building
- Scheduling
- Backlog g management
- Materials management
- Job Package creation, etc.
The goal is to develop a specified level of competency that demonstrate the planner's ability, knowledge, and skills in measurable approach.
Coaching is an investment in this integral role and can be conducted in short sessions either in person, or virtually, until competency is achieved.
Watch this on-demand webinar Maintenance Job Plans: Why Standardize?
