Reliable Plant July August 2008

ADVISOR
PLANNING AND SCHEDULING
‘JA, MAAR’ MENTALITY
CAN SIDETRACK PLANNING
While working this April in
Holland, I saw a plant utilizing
a marvelous Dutch phrase: “Ja,
maar”, which means “Yes, but ...” Seeing it
first-hand helps me understand a principle
of successful planning. Many plants can’t
implement successful planning because
they assign the planners many worthwhile
activities that are not planning. “Yes, planning
is supposed to really help us, but we
need the planner to do this other thing that
really helps us.” Ja, maar.
What is planning? Planning establishes
initial job plans for maintenance work and
improves these plans over time using feedback.
The craft and time estimates allow
scheduling a goal of work for each week
matching available crew labor hours. This
goal greatly improves productivity. Thus,
planning provides a huge boost to crew
productivity through helping better coordinate
maintenance work.
The caveat, of course, is that a plant can
only realize the benefit of planning if it
allows planners to plan. Many plants
create and staff a planner position and
find the planner to be the ideal person to
DOC PALMER
Doc Palmer, CMRP, has nearly 25 years of industrial
experience as a practitioner within the
maintenance department of a major electric
utility. From 1990 through 1994, he was responsible
for overhauling the existing maintenance
planning organization. The resulting success
played a role in expanding planning to all crafts
and stations owned and operated
by the utility. Publisher
McGraw-Hill subsequently
sought out Palmer to author
the “Maintenance Planning
and Scheduling Handbook”,
first published in 1999 and
now in an expanded second
edition (2006). E-mail him at
palmerplanning@bellsouth.net.
do a variety of activities helpful to maintenance.
These activities do indeed help
maintenance improve. Yet, they aren’t
planning activities.
Consider the typical curve of improving
maintenance effectiveness with a planner
(Figure 1). A plant takes a competent
craftsperson out of the workforce to staff a
planner position. Area A illustrates the workforce
losing overall effectiveness because it
has lost a resource. Yet, the new planner
soon develops considerable skill in utilizing
the plant’s CMMS, purchasing bureaucracy
and inventory system. Mechanics on the
crews leverage the planner’s ability to find
information and help them more quickly
resolve problems for jobs they already have
in progress. Yet, this workforce improvement
can only go so high, as Area C shows.
Furthermore, using planners to help resolve
problems for in-progress jobs is not even
planning. I call the principal activity of planners
in this area “Chasing Parts” because
they typically help craftspersons find and
procure spare parts not identified in advance
on a job plan. Many of those in-progress
problems aren’t even new. They are reoccurrences
of typical problems encountered on
those particular machines. This leads to the
need for planning.
By considering past maintenance activities
on particular machines, planners can
plan to avoid specific problems previously
encountered – but only if they are allowed
time to plan. It takes time to file job feedback
and improve job plans. It takes time
to figure out plans for work not yet begun.
If planners can plan, they can take the
organization to levels of effectiveness indicated
by Area E. I call this area “Planning
Future Work” because the primary duty of
the planner should be to head off problems,
not help resolve them as they occur.
My main intent in this article is to shed
some light on Area B. The chasing parts
activity is worthwhile. It does help accomplish
work more effectively. We do need to
resolve problems as they occur on jobs in
progress. Other activities that management
might assign planners also help improve
maintenance effectiveness. These might
include substituting for supervisors on vacation,
participating on root cause teams,
researching ideas for new equipment
modifications, supervising contractors or
even writing follow-up work requests from
PM inspections. Yet, they sidetrack good
planning.
This is why planning has a hard time
getting off the ground. When planners try
to plan future work, they have no time. “Ja,
maar” strikes. “Yes, but” the other activities
are important. Area D even shows an initial
dip in overall effectiveness if the planners
were to stop chasing parts to concentrate
on planning future work.
Management must decide if it wants to
do planning or not. If other activities are
important, assign other resources to
accomplish them, not the planners. A plant
can’t achieve the higher levels of performance
without planners planning.
Effectiveness
Chasing
Parts B
A
Time
Planning
Future
Work
Figure 1. When utilized correctly,
planners improve effectiveness over time.
C
D
E
20 July - August 2008 www.reliableplant.com