Plan & Schedule

Initiate

The initiate stage is where your company will aggregate all known maintenance requirements into a single place.   Ensuring quality in this space by reviewing and approving new work minimises waste in the planning efforts and will avoid duplication.   Here, your organisation must evaluate all aspects of how to locate records, classify, and prioritise duties required to maintain asset health. Inspections and observations, condition monitoring activities, preventative and predictive maintenance tactics, and other improvement work are just a few examples of locations where work will be discovered.

Work will be initiated by a work request or notification, depending on your CMMS and there should be an established procedure for your company’s expectations for initiating work.

In an ideal world, the initiator would be able to assign a risk score to their request. Initiators must raise their requests at the correct asset level; quite often, multiple users will create requests for the same problem at different asset levels, and those charged with reviewing and approving new work cannot be expected to remember every work request they engage with; these will fall through the cracks, causing planners to spend a significant amount of time cleaning up this data.

All new work requests should be evaluated and authorised once a day in a meeting by at least two individuals. Work requests should include adequate detail, and if they don’t, they should be rejected, comments added, and the CMMS should route this work request back to the initiator. Prior to approval, there should be only one problem per work request and a risk-based approach for deciding the final priority of the job.

Plan

Maintenance planning includes determining the scope of work required, challenging the priority of this work, estimating labour requirements and equipment downtime duration.   All materials are to be identified and procured, all standard and special tooling listed, support equipment required, and skills needed.   The work will need to be scoped and then work instructions created, including management of safety or environmental risks.    Tasks are to be consolidated and logically sequenced and work packages created for each sequence. 

Maintenance tasks should only be planned once as long as the Planner applies adequate quality to Work Orders. Review criteria must be followed when reviewing planned work orders before incorporating them into upcoming schedules and any work orders coded as “planned” that do not meet the quality criteria must be rejected, comments added, and your CMMS should route this work order back to the planner for re-planning.

Schedule

When you have a quality scheduling process in place, you review the quality of all work orders coded as fully planned and the approved list of fully planned work orders will ensure your ability to optimise future production and maintenance activities and maximise your company’s ability to be cost effective.

Production requirements, sales commitments, available labour resources, the availability of materials, tools, and support equipment must all be considered during the scheduling process. The goal is to create a timetable that minimises the impact on production while ensuring that maintenance work is completed in an efficient and cost-effective way.

The schedule build process should be thoroughly documented and approved by all stakeholders. Meetings must be scheduled with adequate time allocated and attendance should be mandatory.   Personnel from maintenance, operations, stores, and contractors should be included as stakeholders, and they should actively participate to the formulation of the schedule.   Labour estimates should be extended out at least three months to encourage scheduling approved planned work orders as far out into the future as feasible, rather than just next week.

To optimise downtime and resources, work should be grouped/bundled into the physical locations that will be affected. To ensure awareness of upcoming work, the approved schedule should be distributed to all employees. Any statutory or regulatory work in the schedule should be distinguished from routine maintenance task to emphasise the significance of this work.