Focus on Reliability

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?

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.

Click here to learn more about our Virtual Planner Scheduler Competency Development & Coaching Program.

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

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?