Focus on Reliability

Yes it's that time of year - no I don't mean Thanksgiving or Macy's Parade - not even Christmas or New Years ! What I'm talking about is getting the maintenance plan and budget ready for next year. What are you going to base the plan and budget on? Will it be last year plus 2% or what you think you can get past the finance department?

Welcome to another guest post from our friend, Trent Phillips.

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.

I recently posted this discussion on Linkedin

Sadly for some organizations, their maintenance and operations practices are not much different than the small bands of gold miners going for broke in the Alaskan wilderness as reflected on the television shows.  Operating on s shoestring budget, they try to bootstrap their way along, experiencing increased losses from a run to failure mentality.  While run to failure can be a strategy for some equipment, it shouldn’t be for all of your assets, especially the critical ones.  Proactive organizations learned a long time ago that you can’t typically sustain your business with that approach.

Looking the gold miners, they begin the season by pulling in their heavy equipment and setting up shop on tract of land or claim..  Little is done from condition monitoring perspective to anticipate impending failures. There are no written procedures.  Training occurs from the perspective of tribal knowledge, if someone in the tribe has that knowledge for starters.  In the quest to meet the production numbers, operators push the equipment to its limit. When critical assets fail such as the separation equipment, the operation grinds to a halt. Bootstrapping along the way from a cash perspective, they have few if any spare parts on site.  The nearest spare parts are days away.  This holds true for even benign parts like belts and bearings.  Once the operation restarts, the pressure is on to make up for lost numbers.  When the season ends, they pull back the equipment. Little is done from a time based scheduled restoration perspective to prepare for next season.  They set themselves up for the cycle to repeat, the cycle of despair and reactivity.

Contrast those concepts to your organization and its approach to maintenance and reliability.  Are you operating with an overall run to failure mentality?  If so, use education about the Maintenance Best Practices to help your organization gain a competitive advantage. What else could you do to drive the culture change necessary to gain a proactive reliability based approach?

 

Cheers,

Jeff

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.

From a maintenance perspective, are you scheduling Operations and other support functions?
In many organizations, I find that people are not utilizing the CMMS/EAM to the fullest extent with respect to “crafts” when it comes to coordinating work. You will probably tell me, “Jeff, no surprise there”. It doesn't have to be this way.

Let me explain what I mean. When I look at schedules for maintenance work, rarely do I see crafts listed other than those from the maintenance organization. Let’s take a job like welding on a product tank in a food plant as an example. We need Operations personnel to empty and clean the tank in advance of the welding work. Once the welding work is complete, we may need Operations to clean and sanitize the vessel. Following on, Quality Services or lab personnel may be required to swap the tank for microbial contamination and release it for refill with product. These are all coordination activities that we want to cover with child work orders as an example. In addition, should we not coordinate these activities from a scheduling perspective?

The bottom line is that just like we have crafts such as pipefitter, mechanic, or electrician, we should also have operator, lab tech, or other support functions identified in the CMMS. The work of those individuals and the required coordination of those activities should appear on the weekly schedule with the work order numbers/ work descriptions. When we are in next week’s scheduling meeting, we can set the expectation with Operations and our other partners that we will be needing assistance with equipment availability, possibly help with the maintenance tasks themselves, and the restart of that equipment. Approaching our maintenance tasks and their coordination from a more holistic inclusive viewpoint helps us build better partnerships with the other stakeholders.

Check your schedule and your approach. Are you doing this?

Speak soon,
Jeff

From the People and Processes Youtube channel, I have embedded this video on Maintenance Planning

 

The Maintenance Planning and Scheduling function has four basic objectives:

1. To provide the right information for the technician to more easily to perform the job
2. Have identified the right parts and materials, having them staged and kitted
3. Interface with the Operations partner to ensure the equipment is available for Maintenance at the specified time.
4. To ensure the right priority Maintenance work is accomplished based on business needs

In the end, the function is all about doing the right work while addressing avoidable delays i.e. driving technician wrench time up.  To do this, there are a number of tasks that the Planner Scheduler performs.

1. Avoids getting involved with this week’s emergency work as planning must be focused on the future
2. Reviews work orders requiring planning to understand the requested work
3. Evaluates and understands planned work priorities
4. Job scoping/ research – spends 1/3 of the day in the field
5. Prepares job plans based on level of detail required
6. Maintains a job plan library for reuse
7. Identifies and requisitions/ reserves parts and materials
8. Prepares the job package
9. Interfaces with the Operations group to validate work priority and equipment availability
10. Collaborates with Maintenance Supervisors on next week’s available labor hours to build the weekly schedule from.
11. Develops the next week’s maintenance schedule based on priority
12. Provides a level of coordination in the planning and scheduling phases, not during the execution of the work which the responsibility of maintenance supervision
13. Leads the weekly maintenance scheduling meeting
14. Ensures the preventive maintenance program is scheduled and work-leveled
15. Maintains the asset hierarchy if so required
16. Develops and improving the asset bill of materials
17. Reports on the Key performance indicators (KPI) if required
18. Performs other administration tasks of the CMMS/ EAM if required
19. Reviews completed job feedback to improve job plan content and estimates
20.  Integrates key words on work order closure to assist the data mining for reliability engineering purposes

Get more information on how to improve your maintenance planning and scheduling processes or learn how we guide you to success in the process here. There you will find our training courses, planner coaching, assessment, and more resources.

Are these tasks what you expect for the Maintenance Planner Scheduler?  Would you take any away and why? What others would you add and why?

At what frequency do you calculate the schedule compliance metric? Is it weekly, daily, or hourly?  Depending on who you ask, you might come up with a different answer.  For me, it depends on several factors.  The first one is the level of Maintenance organization reactivity.  That is followed by how long the organization has been producing next week’s schedule.  It might surprise you but a number of organizations still don’t produce a formal schedule for next week.  Another factor is the partnership between Maintenance and Operations.