5 Essential Components of Effective Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

Maintenance planning is a comprehensive process that helps in identifying and addressing any possible production problems ahead of time. It involves identifying parts that are crucial for the completion of a job and ensuring that they are available and placed in their appropriate places. A designated planner provides others with vital information about how to complete a specific job, and even determine and gather a list of critical tools before assigning a particular activity.

It consists of tasks related to parts such as handling reserve elements, ordering non-stocks items, staging and illustrating units, managing malfunctions and vendor lists, and quality assurance and quality control. A good maintenance plan should be able to define "what," "why," and "how." It includes things like what work needs to be done with what materials, tools and equipment, why choosing a specific action, and how the task should be executed.

Maintenance scheduling is a process that involves the actual timing of the planned work when the task should be done and by whom, providing details of "when" and "whom." The basic objective is to achieve things like organizing maximum work with available resources, arranging highest priority work orders, systematizing the maximum number of industrial preventive maintenance tasks, and more.

Effective implementation of both maintenance planning and scheduling should benefit your manufacturing unit in multiple areas. These may include helping in the process of budgeting by controlling resources, reducing equipment downtime, improved workflow, enhanced efficiency by minimizing the movement of resources between areas, and more.

Now, we will discuss the five essential components of effective maintenance planning and scheduling that play a vital role in the success of any organization:

Work Identification

Maintenance personnel have primary duties to identify work of corrective nature related to equipment that is about to fail or has already stopped functioning. These corrective sets of actions are either pinpointed as scheduled corrective maintenance (planning and scheduling of repairs) or breakdown maintenance (fixing the issue at the spot).

One of the best ways of maximizing positive work identification is to empower all employees (not just maintenance staff) to identify and communicate potential correctional work actively. However, there must be some precise techniques in place for recording upcoming corrective action and relating it to the planners.

Work Planning

Appropriate planning leads to effective and efficient work scheduling and execution. After careful identification and prioritization of the corrective or preventive work, it’s time to plan the scheduled tasks properly. Some unique factors need to be considered during this process like time duration of activities, the requirement of type and labour, material, equipment, and permits and managing various job hazards, and others.

Proper planning of the maintenance work will lead to more uptime and less non-routine downtime, efficient and effective use of available resources, ensuring workplace safety, decreasing consequences of downtime and having contingency plans in place are the basic examples of work planning.

Work Scheduling

Correct scheduling of work is crucial for the completion of the organized action in its due time-frame. Some of the ways to maximize work scheduling include the availability of all resources before the start of the actual work, having contingencies in place for any unscheduled breakdowns, and balancing the programmed tasks.

Work Execution

When it comes to performing the planned and scheduled activities, the aim is to minimize wastage of resources and doing things in the right way. This process involves providing adequate training to employees, having additional work completion checks in place for critical tasks, ensuring supervisors check the progress of work regularly, and creating clear, concise, and high-quality work instructions.

Work Completion

In the end, after the work is executed correctly, it’s time to record all the critical information regarding work orders to support your organizational needs and objectives. The objectives of recording work history is to get insights about costs, support performance improvements, failure analysis, and continuous improvement of the work management system, and to incorporate the instructions of work and associated tasks.

The depth and accuracy of this crucial information to support different analyses is to improve the reliability of tools, enhance the precision and quality of work instructions, and augment task time accuracy for future work planning.

Effective maintenance planning and scheduling are highly significant for improving employee productivity, enhancing equipment uptime, and decreasing maintenance costs. It also leads to continued adherence to planned and scheduled processes, an increase in the expected work compliance, and a reduction in the number of unscheduled works during a given time-frame.

Conclusion:

If you need preventive maintenance help or services then contact with the reputed machine shops and preventive maintenance experts like Quality Millwright. They are professionals and will inspect machinery and equipment to avoid frequent machine breakdowns or even more expensive plant shutdowns.