#1: Lack of knowledge about what true Maintenance Planning is.
Lack of Knowledge by Site Management, Operations/Plant Management, and worst of all Maintenance leadership.
“You don’t know what you don’t know”
#2: Not knowing the true wrench time of your maintenance staff.
Average Wrench Time of a Reactive Organization – 10 to 30%
Average Wrench Time of a Proactive Organization – 55 to 70%
Do not your blame your staff for standing around or running for parts; effective Maintenance Planning mitigates this problem.
#3: The true definition of Maintenance Planning has never been written down and followed based on known Best Practices.
Are you confused about what a Maintenance Planner should be doing?
Maintenance Planning Definition
The identification of the parts, tools, procedures, coordination, and standards/specifications required for effective maintenance work in order to increase wrench time and asset availability and reliability.
#4: Maintenance Planning is thought to be the same function as Maintenance Scheduling.
Without a true definition of Maintenance Planning, you will never achieve your goal of optimal reliability at optimal cost. You cannot schedule proactive work if it is not Planned 100% otherwise do not be surprised if a failure re-occurs.
#5: Maintenance Planners or Planner/Schedulers are not trained by a true Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Professional.
If companies understood the true value of a fully trained Maintenance Planner, they would spare no expense to have them trained and coached by a true professional. Think about how a trained and skilled Planner benefits an organization:
- Increase wrench time from 20% to 40%. Maintenance is now completing 100% more work and equipment failures have reduced at a rate never before seen.
- A Maintenance Planner does not react to daily problems; this is the Supervisor’s function. They also do not rush parts or help as a Maintenance Tech.
Without a true master trainer/coach, you can never achieve excellence.
#6: Maintenance Management and Supervision are either fully or partially reactive.
Do not blame maintenance leadership because of their reactive mind set. They were taught this way by someone else. If their thinking does not change, Maintenance Planning will always be reactive. How do you change this way of thinking? By visiting a company who has proactive planning in place and the results of equipment reliability to prove it.
Contact me for a visit, rsmith@gpallied.com
#7: Materials Management is operated in a highly reactive, non-focused state.
- Materials Management will not kit parts in a kitted area or drop parts at a specific location near the work site the day or evening prior.
- Materials Management does not operate a min/max/safety stock inventory based on a criticality assessment of parts.
- Materials Management does have vendors trained to deliver the right part, at the right time, with the right quantity.
- Materials Management Scorecard is not posted for all to see;
- % of time parts are delivered on time
- % of time stock level of critical parts drop below safety stock
- % of time parts are kitted and delivered for work planned by the maintenance planner (these parts must be in a secured area)
- % of parts validated it meets what is recorded in the CMMS/EAM
- Vendor with the highest record of parts delivered late
- Materials Management does not perform PM on highly critical stores items such as large motors, bearings, etc.
This is not about a department or people, it is all about a Proactive Process followed and committed to by management.
#8: Preventive Maintenance is conducted and yet failures continue.
What is happening is that the PM program is not effective. Sure, we meet PM Compliance, but we do not measure the failure rate, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), or Mean Time Between Repair (MTBR) of the assets that receive PM tasks. An ineffective PM or PdM program takes away resources and time that could be used in a proactive state.
Ineffective PMs pull resources needed for proactive planning into reactive maintenance.
#9: No focus, or little focus, on prevention or identification of failure modes.
Failure modes are what we want to prevent or identify early enough so failure will not occur. A good example of prevention would be Conducted Known Best Lubrication Practices to Industries Standards. A good example of early identification is the use of ultrasound to identify a defect, or abnormality, early enough that we can plan the job and schedule it early enough that failure does not occur.
#10: No one has the right Key Performance Indicators for Maintenance Planning.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are identified to provide a Planner with the data needed to ensure they are headed in the right direction. Knowing where you are is the first step to success. These KPIs should be posted for all to see and measured on a weekly basis; they must be defined and truly measurable. It is alright to have a KPI that is not performing to expectations, what is not alright is doing nothing about it. A few KPIs you may use are:
Developed by Ricky Smith, CMRP
- Percent of Planned Work – The percent of all jobs that are planned. A planned job is to have parts kitted, special tools identified, repeatable/effective procedures, coordination identified, and standards/ specifications identified at the minimum.
- Percent of Rework – The percent of planned jobs that required someone to go back to the same asset for the same reason within 90 days.
- Average mean time between when parts are ordered (by the Planner, not Purchasing) and delivered to the Planner’s kitted area.
- Percent of Scheduling Meeting where all parties who are to be coordinated with join the weekly Scheduling Meeting by functional area.
- Percent of time when a part is reserved in the storeroom and released to someone without the Planner who reserved it allowing it to be released for something other than the job planned.
If you like the full document, “The Top Ten Reasons Why Maintenance Planning is Not Effective” or a link to the Recorded PPT send an email to Ricky at rsmith@gpallied.com
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Terry Alexander
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