How long does it take you to complete a typical work order?  Is that time aligned with your customer’s expectations?  Are work costs within budget, or do they continue to climb?  Your facilities maintenance and/or asset management systems contain a wealth of useful information that may be used to increase efficiency without overburdening your staff.

Planning and Scheduling

In an increasingly competitive environment, it’s not uncommon to have more work than your staff can reasonably complete. Increased staffing will provide some immediate relief, but in order to be effective long-term, efficiency and productivity should also be addressed.  Do you have dedicated planning and scheduling roles?  What percentage of your work is planned?  What percentage is scheduled?

Getting Started: Evaluate your past work orders.  Identify work that hasn’t been planned or scheduled, and determine why. Emergencies happen, so there will always be some unplanned, unscheduled work.  However, this should not be the norm.  Once you identify trends, you can enact a system to encourage planned and scheduled work.  This may include:

  • Requiring a work order for all maintenance requests
  • Creating friendly competition to encourage a higher percentage of planned and scheduled work
  • Recognizing maintenance crews for efficiency gains

Maven has developed a series of reports to identify gaps in planning and scheduling processes and explore areas of improvement. Please contact us to find out whether these tools might help you.

Prioritization

If you are not already using one, a work prioritization matrix will help you to ensure that the most critical work is performed in a timely manner, instead of diluting focus with less-essential tasks.  The equipment, location, and the work itself may be prioritized for operational impact, allowing your planners and schedulers to quickly assess needs, and the business to continue operations with minimal downtime.

Getting Started: Identify equipment (assets) and locations that are critical to your business.  Assign top priority to equipment where downtime would be catastrophic to your organization, whether it be in terms of revenue or publicity.  Next, identify equipment where downtime might not be catastrophic, but would still have significant operational impact.  Highly-regulated industries, such as pharma, life sciences, and oil and gas already provide guidelines for safety and operational criticality. Use these guidelines to ensure your maintenance work is aligned with your priorities.

If you are using IBM Maximo, once you prioritize your equipment, work orders will automatically identify that priority, enabling your planners, schedulers, and crews to quickly assess needs and complete the most important work first.

Summary

If you are using an asset management system such as IBM Maximo, you likely have a wealth of data at your disposal.  Harness it to identify opportunities for improvement in planning, scheduling and prioritization.  Maven has helped dozens of organizations to do just that, and would be glad to help you as well.  For more information, please contact us.