Planning and Scheduling Maintenance Activities

It has been said that the tools of good maintenance are planning, scheduling, and cost accounting. The planning and scheduling section of the maintenance department has the basic responsibility for establishing job priorities, for insuring that necessary tools and materials are available and for preparing and issuing written schedules of jobs to be done.

The size and organisation of the planning and scheduling group will depend on the size and complexity of the maintenance organization. In a small company, the maintenance supervisor may perform all of the planning and scheduling. Under such circumstances the planning and scheduling will probably be handled on quite an informal basis. Large companies utilize a special group to plan and schedule jobs. Although much of the work done in this section is clerical in nature, the supervisor of the group should be a person with broad experience in maintenance methods. Such knowledge frequently is necessary to coordinate the scheduling of the workmen in the maintenance department.

In order to do the necessary day-to-day and long-range planning required making most effective utilization of the maintenance personnel suitable routines are necessary. These shall involve:

• The securing of necessary approval from the plant engineer for any projects that are of sufficient magnitude to require his attention;
• The securing of information from equipment records, work orders, work measurement data, craft and shops work force reports, storekeeper's procurement reports, the plant production schedule, and other pertinent sources; and
• Reference to existing master schedules. As is true of all scheduling activities, basic to maintenance scheduling and control is an estimate of the time required for each work order prior to doing the work.

The scheduling of maintenance work involves essentially two steps - a master plan of all jobs that can be predicted in advance and a daily adjustment of this plan necessitated by emergencies. In most plants there are a number of machines and inspection and overhaul. The frequency of these occurrences will vary with the equipment, but experience figure subjected to suitable mathematical and statistical analysis will indicated the optimum time for the minimum over all costs. After these times have been established, they can be incorporated into the master maintenance schedule.

The master maintenance schedules may be broken down into weekly or daily maintenance schedules. If used, the weekly work schedule will provide information to each craft and shop concerning the work to be done on each job for each day in the following week. This schedule would normally be issued every Thursday or Friday and would be the basis for each maintenance foreman to issue daily work assignments to the workers. Some maintenance departments prefer to centralise this function and have daily work assignments issued directly by a dispatcher in the job control section. Whatever system is used, it is sound practice to issue work assignments for the next day to each craftsman prior to the end of the workday.

Accurate information on the number of hours of labour spent on each job any materials used is essential items for cost-accounting purposes. These charges are made against the pertinent departments and become one of the costs of manufacturing. Further, the costs provide a check on the operating effectiveness of the departments concerned.