4 Common Mistakes of Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

 

One of the critical features of a plant operation, is its effective maintenance management in establishing conditions for safe operations, and in supporting the commercial success of the business.

 

Effective maintenance reduces overall company cost because production capacity is available when needed. The company makes a product with this capacity to sell at a profit. This explains the reliability-cost relationship: focus on overall cost reduction and reliability gets worse but focus on reliability improvement and overall cost goes down. Nevertheless, examining the cost of the maintenance operation cannot be dismissed as unimportant. After maintenance effectiveness, maintenance efficiency must be considered.

 

Maintenance planning is a major strategy to improve maintenance efficiency with regard to unproductive maintenance time. Implementing proper planning and scheduling can improve productive maintenance time by double. Industry experience also shows that typical workforce wrench time is between 25 and 35 percent. Planning and scheduling can help raise this rate above 50 percent.

 

Here are 4 common mistakes of maintenance planning and scheduling:

 

1. Provide poor instructions for maintenance jobs

When maintenance personnel receive unclear or incomplete instructions, they are unable to complete tasks properly and often have to stop to search for additional information. To avoid this, instructions given by the planner need to be complete and include all the tools and materials required, while also being simple enough for all to understand.

 

2. Fail to provide feedback regarding the work that was done

Once a maintenance job is complete, a proper detailed feedback should be documented regarding the work was done. Failure to do so affects the quality of the data going into the system. This would affect future jobs and where technicians would not have enough existing data to identify problems and provide recommendations. Hence, comprehensive feedback from technicians helps planners to learn and prepare for future jobs.

 

3. Fail to make changes based on feedback from maintenance technicians

After receiving feedback from technicians, a common mistake made by the planner is the failure to implement changes. It is important that planners take the feedback into consideration and address the concerns raised. This way, employee morale will remain high as they feel like their opinions are being valued and they will continue to provide good feedback.

 

4. Ignore Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Without KPIs, there is no way to measure the effectiveness of the maintenance planning and scheduling strategy. Setting and monitoring KPIs allows areas of improvement to be raised to guide the decision-making process. This would provide valuable insight into the performance of the maintenance team.

 

In addition to reduced maintenance costs and improved reliability, proper maintenance planning and scheduling provides a competitive edge for your organisation in the global marketplace.

 

 

 

To improve your understanding of maintenance planning and scheduling, Inspectioneering Journal has published a featured article on the best practices based on the 6 maintenance planning and scheduling principles. It also discusses the following topics such as definitions of key terms such as work planning and work scheduling, maintenance scheduling principles and the essential elements for planning and scheduling.  

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“Best Practices Of Maintenance Planning & Scheduling”