Christer Idhammar

Founder and CEO

IDCON INC

USA

To plan and schedule work seems sosimple and obvious to do, but very feworganizations do it well. Many mightbe reasonably good at planning and schedulingshutdowns and outages, but weeklyand daily planning and scheduling veryoften represents a significant improvementopportunity.

The reasons for better shutdown planning,scheduling and execution is becausesome of the following reasons:

1. The length of the shutdown has animmediate impact on productionthroughput.
2. They involve many people and areexpensive.
3. As a result of point one and twoabove, plant leadership care andresponsible individuals will have toexplain if a shutdown is not doneas scheduled.

Weekly and daily planning and scheduling is very often done poorly even if the positions of planner(s) are in place. In a survey of over one thousand participants, the result was that 90 % of them used less than 60 % of their time to actually plan work. Results of another survey of over 1300 participantsare shown in Figure 1 where each respondent mentioned three reasons to why they do not plan work as well as they can and/or would like to do.

As seen in Figure 1, the two very dominantreasons are “Too many breakdowns”and “Too many emotional priorities” followedby “Operations do not support planningprocess”, “Planners have not been trained”, and “Poor technical documentation”. Over 20 % responded “Top managementdoes not support planning process”.

My experience reflects the same common phenomenon. The same survey couldhave been done many years ago with thesame results.

Too Many Breakdowns

Too many breakdowns indicate a lack of prevention and condition monitoring. Your organization might have a well-documented Preventive Maintenance (PM) programme but content might be wrong and/or the programmeis not executed to 100 %.

A well-functioning PM programme should result in 60–80 % of all work requests being generated from the condition monitoring programme.

Too Many Emotional Priorities

By “emotional priority” we mean a priority set by emotions, not facts on what is most important to do for the business. Over-prioritizing work is very expensive because it makes it almost impossible to schedule work. Crafts people are frequently interrupted by work that is often much less important than what they are working on according to the schedule. The carrying out of a maintenance job earlier than necessary can be compared to the manufacturing of an item before itis demanded.

Figure 1. Reasons given why planning of work is not done.

Many emotional priorities indicate that the organization is divided in such a way,that operations look at themselves as customersof maintenance services and maintenanceview themselves as providers of serviceto the customer operations. In a resultsoriented and reliability-focused organization, people understand that the product of the maintenance organization is Equipment Reliability and Asset Preservation and this is what they deliver to their equal partner i.e. Operations, which in this partnership delivers Process Reliability. They have the manufacturing process expertise and know-how to make the product: what material to use, pressures, speed, chemistry, and other manufacturing parameters to deliver a reliable manufacturing process.

The common mission between operations and maintenance is to deliver continuously improved total manufacturing or production reliability.

The reason for many emotionally urgent jobs is often that the requester of work, in this case Operations, have learned that you cannot trust that a job with a lower urgency than priority one, will be done. It is important that you build trust between operation sand maintenance; if a job is prioritized in a work request to be done within a week the maintenance department must demonstrate that the job will be completed within the agreed time.

A process that I have used many times isto meet with key people in operations and maintenance to agree on a guideline for theright priorities of a requested work.

Start by asking “What constitutes that a job must be done immediately and break other less important ongoing work?”. It is quite obvious that the answer will include that the situation indicates:

• An immediate and unmanageable safety risk or risk for environmental damage.
• An immediate risk for quality losses.
• An immediate risk for high maintenance cost if equipment runs to break down.

There could also be other issues, but in summary this is what almost always comes up as an answer.

The next question could be “ What situations would describe that a job can wait one day to one week?” and the answerswould typically include:

• Critical equipment isrunning at reduced speed.
• Critical equipment is running in manual mode.
• Manageable safety risk.
• PM Activity.
• Mandatory inspections.
• Estimated time to Breakdown 2–30 days.

Again, there could be several other issues or reasons.

The third question could be “What situations would describe that a job can wait over a week?”and the typical answers could include:

• Critical equipment is running on spare equipment
• Leaks
• Spare equipment out of function.
• Failures that need correction
• Estimated time to breakdown 7–90 days.

In these examples, it is important that a monitoring process ofthe working condition is in place, otherwise it would be difficult to estimate time to breakdown.

One point that often generates much discussion is “Critical equipment is running on spareequipment”. Many plants will call in maintenance to repair the failed equipment because they fear that the spare equipment in use will also fail. If both pieces of equipment have been operated an equal amount of time by shifting them after every shut down or at other good opportunity, this should eliminate that fear.

Figure 2 shows an example of a colour-coded priority guideline card. A number of these cards can be laminated so that requestors, planners, coor-dinators, supervisors and other scan carry them with them. When someone tries to over-prioritizea work request, they quickly discover that they have to respond to questions such as: “Is this really a red job? I do not agree with you, I think it is a yellowjob”. Also print these priority guidelines and post them in meeting rooms where the planning and scheduling of work takes place.

The value of creating and documenting the priority guidelinelies mostly in the process that you use to arrive at the documented priority guideline. A month of disciplined and daily use and reinforcement of the priority guideline shows significant reductions in emotional emergency work in most organizations.

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Figure 2. An example of a colour-coded card for an agreed-upon priority guideline.

Click Image to Enlarge

Figure 3. This example shows a priority guideline based on assumed risk and consequences of a break-down.