Maintenance planning principles Effective maintenance planning can improve maintenance efficiency.

Improve your maintenance and shutdown planning by implementing these seven principles of planning:

Principle 1: Organize your maintenance planners into their own department. The planners report to a different supervisor than that of the maintenance technicians.

Principle 2: Focus on planning future work. Technicians provide feedback on current jobs. The maintenance planners use the feedback in planning for future work.

Principle 3: Maintain a database system based on equipment numbers for tracking jobs. Maintenance planners use data from previous jobs to improve plans for future work. For maintenance shutdown planning, shutdown planning software can improve the planning process.

Principle 4: Use personal experience to plan work estimates to avoid delays and safety problems. The planners should be expert technicians trained in planning techniques.

Principle 5: Recognize the skills of maintenance technicians. Provide only the minimum details necessary for job plans.

Principle 6: Understand the purpose of planning is to improve wrench time and reduce delays.

Principle 7: After a shutdown is over, use "lessons learned" to restructure some of your library job plans for reuse in future shutdowns.

Maintenance scheduling principles Effective maintenance scheduling can reduce production downtime. Improve your maintenance and shutdown scheduling by implementing these six principles of scheduling:

Principle 1: Develop job plans that provide details such as number of persons required, minimum skill level, and estimated labor hours.

Principle 2: Adhere to weekly and daily time schedules. Prioritize work.

Principle 3: Forecast a weekly labor hours schedule for each crew based on technician skills available for the week.

Principle 4: The weekly schedule assigns work for every labor hour available. Use the details of job plans to match labor hours available with estimated labor hours.

Principle 5: The maintenance crew supervisor schedules and assigns daily work. Use current job progress, job priority, and other relevant information as a guide for planning the daily schedule.

Principle 6: Measure schedule success. Use schedule compliance with the one week schedule as the measure of scheduling effectiveness. Developing the shutdown program When planning a maintenance shutdown (also known as "turnaround" or "outage"), your goal as the shutdown planner should be to produce a detailed, time-based plan, not just a list of jobs to complete. To make the most efficient use of the available shutdown time, strive for a minute-by-minute schedule of tasks. Even though planned tasks may change day to day, having a detailed schedule will result in savings of time and dollars and allow you to easier manage unforeseen work. To arrive at such a schedule, follow these basic steps during your shutdown or turnaround planning process:

Develop the shutdown worklist. Plan the workscope. Plan the shutdown jobs and tasks. Complete the shutdown schedule. Developing the shutdown worklist

Developing of the shutdown worklist should begin immediately after completion of a preceding shutdown. During the period between shutdowns, maintenance technicians should add potential work to the worklist as they recognize the work. The technicians should initiate a work request for each job, and the request should be routed to the shutdown planner for evaluation. In addition, the shutdown planner should establish a deadline for submitting work to the worklist.

As the shutdown worklist is a dynamic document, you should meet regularly with representatives from other departments (i.e., the shutdown planning team) involved in the shutdown to review the worklist. The primary purpose of these meetings is to eliminate jobs that may no longer be necessary and possibly add new jobs. As the cut-off deadline approaches, these meetings will result in identification of jobs that are most important and are achievable with the available resources and time. Reducing the stress level during a maintenance shutdown Maintenance shutdowns and turnarounds disrupt the activities of normal business and increase the workload on maintenance resources. This disruption and increase in workload often increase the stress level of those responsible for planning and executing the shutdown.

In his book, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook, Doc Palmer provides several suggestions to help reduce stress on maintenance personnel. This article presents a few of his suggestions.

By implementing these suggestions, you can improve your maintenance shutdown planning efficiency and shutdown outcomes.

Estimates arent perfect Maintenance shutdowns and turnarounds require maintenance personnel to complete a lot of work in a short period. As a result, maintenance planners may feel pressure to achieve perfect estimates of labor hours for jobs. However, estimates often cannot account for unforeseen situations that are out of a planner's control.

To reduce the stress maintenance planners feel, management should not expect planned jobs to have perfect estimates for labor hours. Management should tell planners they were selected for planning jobs based on their craft experience, to provide their best guess, and forget about it.

Work assignments and expectations A maintenance supervisor should assign each maintenance technician a full day of work at the beginning of the day, not one job at a time. Base the amount of work to assign on the maintenance planners estimates, which should be reasonable. This approach lets the maintenance technicians set their goals of how much work to accomplish each day and helps them pace their workday. This approach reduces the stress of wondering what the next job is and eliminates guessing at expectations.

Focus on overall daily work completion Management should not hold technicians to the planned hours for a single job. Instead, focus on technicians completing all jobs assigned to them for the day.

Good maintenance planners estimate reasonable amount of work for a week and maintenance supervisors can assign reasonable amount of work for each day. Maintenance productivity increases because the plant assigns a reasonable amount of work.

Supervisor pay and schedule compliance Management should not tie a maintenance supervisor's pay to schedule compliance. Tying pay to schedule compliance introduces stress automatically. Instead, management should tell the maintenance supervisor to begin each week with a planned daily schedule of work to accomplish and report on how much work the maintenance technicians accomplish during the week.

Accomplishing as much work as possible now will help avoid future possible emergencies. Tell the supervisors it is "okay" to break from the schedule. The goal is not perfect schedule compliance but rather it is perfect plant performance.

Planning work orders for maintenance shutdowns Many process industry plants have work orders they can execute only during maintenance shutdowns (also known as maintenance turnarounds and maintenance outages). To facilitate shutdown planning and help the maintenance planner, the plant maintains a worklist of these work orders.

Planning work orders for shutdowns and turnarounds is very similar to planning work orders for normal operations, with only a few differences. During a shutdown, maintenance technicians have limited time to gather parts and other information. Therefore, the plant turns to the maintenance planner, using a project management tool, to identify and reserve the parts and other resources necessary for completing the work. The planner also can do this for reactive maintenance outside of a scheduled shutdown. However, maintenance planners place emphasis on quickly planning shutdown work orders in the event an unscheduled shutdown occurs and requires finished plans.

Individual work orders may constitute most of the work for a shutdown. However, large jobs for specific equipment may instead require data, such as parts and tools used, from previous shutdowns. A shutdown planning tool is an excellent way to make this data readily available and speeds up the shutdown planning process.

In summary, starting and maintaining a worklist of work to complete for your next shutdown will improve the shutdown planning process. If you keep the maintenance worklist in a database or spreadsheet, there are obvious advantages to importing the data into your shutdown planning tool. You can then have the planning tool report back after technicians complete the worklist item. In addition, using a maintenance shutdown planning tool to archive a history of previous shutdown work will make planning of future shutdowns easier and more efficient. Opportunities for improving maintenance shutdown management A maintenance shutdown, also commonly known as a plant turnaround or outage, can be disruptive to plant operations. In addition, planning and managing a shutdown is one on the most resource-intensive and costly activities a company can undertake. Given these conditions, there are several areas you can evaluate to improve your shutdown management.

Timing Many companies plan their shutdowns during the summer months, often a time when many employees take their annual vacation. Take the opportunity to do a cost-benefit analysis of the shutdown scheduling and move the shutdown to a more cost-effective time. For example, consider moving the shutdown to a period of slow production. Such a move could save your company millions.

Shutdown scale

Instead of scheduling a large shutdown to occur only every three or four years, consider using smaller scale shutdowns more frequently. Benefits of this approach can include reduction in overtime, less frequent disruptions in production, and decreases in production losses and start-up costs.

If you use a CMMS for planning and tracking maintenance jobs and schedules and related cost data, then you can use its data to identify production areas and equipment for short-duration shutdowns. Establishing a sequence of areas for short-duration shutdowns can help your cover all areas of your plant while reducing disruption to normal plant operations as you experience with a large-scale shutdown.

Maintaining a worklist is another way to control the scale of a shutdown. After completing a shutdown, start compiling a list of work items to schedule and complete during the next shutdown. Establish a cutoff date for submitting work for the next shutdown. As you begin the detail planning and scheduling process for the next shutdown, you can use the list to identify work to include in the next shutdown or hold until a future shutdown.

To reduce the shutdown scale further, divide your shutdown into three distinct stages: pre-shutdown, shutdown, and post-shutdown. Review the worklist and complete as many maintenance activities as possible during the pre-shutdown and post-shutdown stages. This approach can help you reduce the amount of time your facility is actually out of operation.

Planning and scheduling Detailed planning and scheduling is necessary to carry out an effective shutdown. To plan a shutdown effectively and efficiently, you need good CMMS and shutdown planning software tools. These tools include features for planning and tracking work orders, identifying resources necessary for completing job tasks, conducting what-if analysis on multiple shutdown scenarios, and more. In addition, you can use the reporting tools available in the CMMS and turnaround planning software to track the shutdown performance, identify problem areas, and make adjustments to keep the shutdown on schedule.

Shutdown planning is a complex process. The more detail you can put in your plan, the easier it is for you to manage shutdown execution. Be sure to include details, such as extra delivery time for materials or special permit requirements, which may affect scheduling of a job.

Considering the fact that a shutdown can easily be the largest drain on a maintenance budget, the time and money you invest in planning and scheduling is well worth the return on investment (ROI).

Stakeholders Involving stakeholders from all departments affected by a shutdown is essential to a successful shutdown. You should involve stakeholders throughout all phases of the shutdown planning and execution process to ensure communication of critical information. If necessary, provide specialized training to personnel and contractors to ensure adequate preparation for executing the shutdown safely and efficiently.

Shutdown outcome The shutdown team needs to define target goals and expected results for successful shutdown. Reports available in your CMMS and shutdown software tools can track the performance targets. For example, a target may be improvement in shutdown management by reducing shutdown costs compared to previous shutdowns.

After completion of the shutdown, perform a post-shutdown review to identify successes and areas that need improvement. Compiling, analyzing, and archiving this information in your shutdown planning software can help you identify improvements for future shutdowns.