Planning
Planning is a fundamental success factor for improving your maintenance work execution. Without proper planning, less work gets done. It turns out that this is vital for any Asset Management Strategy that relies on time based maintenance (Preventative actions, scheduled discards, calibrations, minor servicing) or time based inspections as part of an On-condition maintenance regiment.
Fundamentally we schedule preventative maintenance and on-condition inspections to combat failure modes thought to exist in our assets, as a way to increase the asset reliability. With any increase in reliability, comes an improvement in availability. Increases in availability deliver better profitability and return on investments, and have indirect positive effects on safety.
If we cannot maintain the asset’s according to the asset strategy that has been designed to thwart the asset’s failure modes, things can go horribly wrong. Almost all industrial disasters in the last 100 years have poor maintenance practices (execution) as one of the contributing factors.
Planning (and Scheduling) are just one of the four essential elements that every organization must deliver in order to deliver improved asset reliability and all it its subsequent tertiary benefits. Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, must be combined with sound preventative maintenance and on-condition monitoring strategy, plus a strong defect elimination program and the right focus of the organization’s leadership work culture.
Most organizations are already practicing some form of a calendar based preventative maintenance and on-condition maintenance inspection program. Typically these are found in the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or as a PM module of an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution. The solutions we typically see are flawed and incomplete in many critical areas. What is almost alwayys lacking from all systems is robust planning (and Scheduling).
Robust maintenance planning is cross linked to several other critical implementations, which when absent or materially incomplete, the ability to perform robust maintenance planning is not possible.
We can help you team solve this problem and introduce you to waste free work execution methods that also fit within your CMMS, so they become sustainable over time.
There is little benefit to improving maintenance strategies, or collecting failure data, root cause analysis, and defect elimination if your planning is substandard.
As we navigate the intricate tapestry of maintenance planning it is important to focus on the foundational systems that enable the delivery of strong work execution built upon solid maintenance planning applied to your asset maintenance strategy.
Getting the work done to suppress a known asset failure mode is the key linking enabler to reliability improvement. If we fail to get the work done, we will fail to suppress the failure mode intended to be combatted by your existing preventative or on-condition strategy. Critically, we need to get all the preventative and on-condition work completed each cycle of the program if we are to expect our existing strategy will have full effect. If we have more work than staff, reliability will suffer simply because not all of the strategy has been worked.
Often the failure to work the complete asset strategy is caused by less than adequate maintenance planning. Typically this manifests as work we attempted to perform, but on the day scheduled, could not complete for one of many reasons. These reasons are rather common across industry, and our reasons are not unique. The failure to address maintenance as a production problem, leads to maintenance inefficiency and it is manifested by low “wrench time” (Time actually spent doing maintenance work).
Wrench time is a measurement of how much productivity is generated on a particular shift by the maintenance personnel. While we DO perform wrnch time studies upon request, we would rather work on the reasons you have low wrench time as part of a custom uplift program, because the reasons for low wrench time are common through industry. We can tell where your wrench time is just by looking at your planning or your storeroom.
Doc Palmer (author of the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling handbook) once said during a conference session – “If you think your wrench time is 80% – Its not”. It is a common belief amongst production managers maintenance workers should work as much as production workers. While production is often the focus of many efficiency improvement programs like, LEAN, 5S, Operational Excellence, and TPM, maintenance is often not involved.
Typical wrench time numbers for a reactive 4th quartile plant are in the neighborhood of 29%.
Waste (or “muda” for our LEAN friends) comes in many forms and almost ALL are caused by the way the company has allowed work to be done. In other words, it is due to a defective work execution process. Over time, the organizational culture and necessity have unconsciously tolerated the introduction of waste into the maintenance work processes.
Our planning Uplift programs target the sources of unconcious waste in your work execacution processes, and deliver solutions to allow you to move forward and realize the maintenance productivity gains possible with an integrated fullyy prepared work flow process.
Call us to discuss how to take the next step and elevate your planning and remove waste.
WRENCH TIME
Welcome to a world of limitless possibilities, where your work execution is perfected, your operated detailed continually improving job plans, and your organization is realizing all of the promised efficiencies, positive reliability improvements, high availability and demonstrated safety performance.
Create anything
Welcome to a world of limitless possibilities, where the journey is as exhilarating as the destination, and where every moment is an opportunity to make your mark on the canvas of existence.
Create anything
Welcome to a world of limitless possibilities, where the journey is as exhilarating as the destination, and where every moment is an opportunity to make your mark on the canvas of existence.
Create anything
Welcome to a world of limitless possibilities, where the journey is as exhilarating as the destination, and where every moment is an opportunity to make your mark on the canvas of existence.