Focus on Reliability

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.

Quantify the maintenance backlog
The backlog represents a comprehensive list of all work yet to be completed. It may include overdue PM tasks, corrective actions, safety items, and so on. Overdue PM tasks in the backlog highlight problems in your work processes. Determine if the work is complete. If the tasks and frequencies are valid and not done, then we can expect failures. Along with that, a reactive state with equipment availability.

I’ve addressed this before but backlog work orders should not have birthdays of the annual sort. If it’s been on the list for a year, most likely it is not important. Remove unnecessary work orders from the backlog. Now, place labor estimates on the work in the backlog. You need these hours to determine the how many crew weeks of backlog exist. The backlog metric should be trended at least on a monthly basis based on the hours, not the number of work orders. Here is an article that I wrote previously for Maintenance Planning and Scheduling metrics..

Determine your ability to accomplish maintenance work
At the end of the day, the goal is to schedule more work. To do this, you need to understand the available crew size for each week. Personally, I prefer the maintenance supervisor to work with the maintenance planner scheduler to provide those estimated available hours at least two weeks out. Yes, I realize things change, people take a vacation, get sick, have family emergencies. But we need a starting place. Maybe you’re too reactive and don’t believe you have the resources to schedule 100% of the available hours.  OK, start with 60%. Just start.

Find windows for maintenance work
The planner scheduler role knows the maintenance backlog. As such, the individuals should be looking for and negotiating for maintenance work windows. This effort requires working with production or operations planning in partnership. Some organizations have a production gatekeeper to help move things along. There are lots of windows for work often overlooked. Here is an article that I wrote for Plant Engineering Magazine on the topic (add link to this sentence). 

Build the draft maintenance schedule
Now we should understand the PMs that are triggering each week at least two weeks in advance. Future work has received some level of maintenance planning. We’ve identified the maintenance backlog. We know our estimated hours available for work. We understand the production windows. Time to build the schedule for next week. Assuming a Sunday to Saturday schedule, this should be completed by Tuesday of the week prior. Ultimately, we want to get at least two weeks ahead but start somewhere. Knowing available equipment windows, we can place that work on those days or windows. Once built, email the draft to the stakeholders to include production managers and supervisors. Ask for people to come with changes before the weekly scheduling meeting so they can be integrated early.
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Struggling to put together a full week's schedule or to properly leverage the planning function?

The weekly maintenance scheduling meeting
This meeting should be on late Thursday or early Friday so that the meeting time is close to the start of the schedule period. Fewer changes occur that way. Keep in mind, it’s not a planning meeting but a scheduling meeting to confirm next week’s work as a minimum along with any special coordination activities. The planning part should have happened long before this meeting to ensure parts and time to plan. Two main components for this meeting: next week's schedule and review of the metrics from the previous week. Part of the metrics review must include schedule breakers that prevented you from accomplishing the schedule. Keep it short and sweet. 

What gets measured, gets done
While the metrics discussion is a longer subject in itself, please make sure you have a progression plan using the measures for continuous improvement.

 There you have it, six items to implement to improve your maintenance scheduling. In later columns, we will address the other items related to the work execution process. 

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