Planning Discipline for World Class Maintenance

A recent experience teaming up with Preston Ingalls, one of my most admired mentors, made me see the need to write this brief reflection, I hope you will find it applicable... 

Most of the traditional ways of doing maintenance lack the discipline needed to succeed these days when Maintenance Productivity is so critical for any operation.

The “urgency” of making some repair may cause us to fail in this process and of course make the Maintenance Operation more costly and inefficient. This can also be caused by the Culture of "The way it has always been done." An organized process is needed in order to  achieve optimal utilization of our resources however limited or abundant these might be.

A strong planning will generally allow for us to have on hand all the right resources to perform the work in a secure and timely manner and produce the optimal and most productive result. Along with the planning, scheduling will help us succeed at bringing the plan to fruition...

What is involved in the Planning?

Some of the considerations and input that we need to perform a good planning are:

• Clear knowledge of the equipment and its criticality

• Awareness of the operations performed

• Documentation of history and previous maintenance reports

• Input from vendors of the equipment when available

• Communications with parts suppliers

• Communication with the owners of the equipment:

• Operator(s)

• Supervisor or Manager of Operations

• Knowledge about our human resources

• Knowledge about tooling and other necessary items

Not Planning is Planning to Fail

What is the Scheduling Process?

Once the work has been clearly planned, the scheduling will take into consideration:

• Best time to do the job

• Knowledge of the right amount of time needed

• Availability of all resources required

• Agreement of our customers, the equipment owners

• Thorough preparation of resources in the area by the time of start

Plan the Job – Work the Plan

Other critical requirements for success:

Training

Thorough training of our human resource, managers included, is essential. Most defective work is caused by the lack of training. It is indispensable to keep a constant improvement in terms of training. Equipment evolves constantly and so do resources like tools, methods, instruments, etc. when we stop learning, the world will keep changing, and leave us in the dust of obsolescence.

Standardization

When we have people doing the same job in different ways, repeatability of results is practically impossible and sustainability will be impossible. This fact makes it necessary to have the different technicians and stake holders analyze, communicate, and discuss their different methods to perform a task. This way they should reach agreement as to which method is best, usually it will be a combination of two or more of their methods, and they all will be learning from each other and producing a SPS or Standardized Process Sheet, that they all will own, and will likely have some explanatory pictures and make it easier for everyone to follow the directions of the standard method. As a results we will have summed up all of the Skills, Strengths, and Experiences within our team. As a secondary effect, our SPS will become a valuable Training Tool! Here is an example:

Sample of SPS (deliberately distorted) from the arsenal of TALSICO