Keep Your Planners Focused

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Here are 13 pitfalls that should be avoided if your planner is going to be effective.

Why do maintenance organizations often struggle to implement successful planning and scheduling processes? As summed up here, a white paper from Houston-based Nexus Global Business Solutions Inc., points to 13 pitfalls:

1. Selecting the wrong person as planner
The planner/scheduler (planner) position is one of the most critical in the maintenance organization. Putting the right person with the right skills in this role is paramount to the overall success of the group.

2. Inadequately training planners
Give your planners the type of training that makes them successful in their jobs. They’re key to making a maintenance department effective and efficient, and increasing crew utilization.

3. Using planners as relief personnel
A planner cannot—and should not—be considered as a relief position (of any kind) or tasked with multiple job responsibilities. If these individuals are doing everything they should be doing, they won’t have time for anything else.

4. Using planners for emergency or unscheduled work
Don’t use planners as “firefighters.” Beware of this common trap. If they are constantly pulled away from planning efficient, effective future work, a site will never get out of a reactive state.

5. Planning work from a desk
Another trap involves some planners’ sense of “knowing it all.” Planners must always visit the jobsite. Otherwise, they might not be aware of issues at a machine for which they need to plan, i.e., a safety matter, an access situation.

6. Improperly allocating resources and material
Allocation of resources and material in a sequence that allows performance of essential work in the shortest time at the least cost is a planner’s most crucial (and difficult) tasks. He/she should live to reduce and eliminate wasted time.

7. Providing poor job instructions
Planners must ensure that new and seasoned mechanics alike have enough information to do a job. If everything is prepared properly, personnel should not have to search for anything, including information.

8. Not providing feedback
Once work is completed, proper feedback must be documented to state what was done. Post-job feedback will document what it actually took to do the work, i.e., time, special tools, and materials, thus helping the planner learn and prepare for future work.

9. Not kitting and staging
Planning is work preparation. Planners should prepare everything needed to allow the job to be completed—without the mechanics having to stop and go get anything.

10. Asking mechanics for feedback and not making the changes
Another common trap for planners is related to PM work-order feedback. If they convince mechanics to provide good feedback, i.e., making edits, deletions, and additions to tasks as they perform them, it’s important to make the suggested changes. Otherwise, asking for and getting feedback a second time will be difficult.

11. Not gaining cooperation and coordinating with operations partners
A planner can build the very best job plans and put a great-looking schedule together to get work accomplished. But if it’s done in a maintenance-department vacuum, it won’t be successful. Planners must build partnerships with operations.

12. Poor backlog management
To stay efficient and prevent mistakes, planners must keep backlogs of “ready-to-go” work clean. They can’t let work that’s already been done clutter a backlog of open work orders.

13. Metrics
Too many metrics “muddy the waters.” Planners must choose those that best guide the decision-making process for properly running a business unit, then present them in a graphic format that can be easily understood in 20 sec. or less. MT

To learn more, about this topic and other asset performance management (APM) issues, visit nexusglobal.com.