Overview

Benjamin Franklin says: By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Planning and then scheduling maintenance work has demonstrated a capability for significant increases in productivity. That factor alone recommends it to the Lean Maintenance Hall of Fame. The reason why Planning and then scheduling is so effective is simple to say but difficult to accomplish.

The easy part is that scheduling the planned work allows the planner to work out the problems (generally with absent or conflicted resources.) ahead of time. Working out problems ahead of time saves 3 to 5 times the time invested, in reduced execution time. In terms of both forced and planned shutdowns, the savings could very well exceed 50 times.

The more difficult task is to manage the thousands of details that make up the resources of all the maintenance jobs running currently and in the near future. We have to manage the labor and skills, parts and materials, tools and equipment, access and permits, for the asset to be worked on, and finally to provide any required drawings, diagrams, or specific information.

In a modern maintenance department, this information is usually held in the CMMS database. Keeping up with this data is a Sisyphian task that is never done. The details available are always sketchy and imperfect. Even the scope of work is not always known until after the job starts. Yet planners have struggled against the odds to create effective plans that help the workers get the right stuff to...