Focus on Reliability

As many of us who have been a part of a maintenance organization realize, the function of the Planner is usually one in which we expect to get a lot of return for our investment.

Maintenance Planners, who are tasked with improving the efficiency of the Technicians working time, are often placed in the role without the benefit of formal training and coaching.

A couple of months ago, I visited an organization that had just started an initiative to reduce their spend on spare parts. The odd thing about this initiative was that it was driven by finance and procurement. The focus was on cutting the price they paid for these spare parts. When I asked why this initiative had started, I was told that someone in finance felt that their procurement practices weren’t what they should be. They believed that there was opportunity to cut costs through better management of the process.

How many technicians per planner-scheduler? Should we focus on system ownership, or business goals? Find out this and more with our video, and register for our class here!

I was involved in a discussion on Linkedin recently when the question was asked It is believed that you can plan without scheduling but cannot schedule without planning – the discussion took some twists and turns until I thought I’d post my experiences with this question – this is what I wrote!

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

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.

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.