What issues do you track in an effort to address breaking the maintenance schedule?

Examples:
What broke the schedule?
How critical is the unit or process?
Describe the situation?
Why did this take priority?
Who approved the break-in?
Was this an actual emergency?
How much time was deviated to accomplish the task?
How are we going to prevent this from breaking the schedule again?

Are talking about maint scehduled for both CM & PM works? If yes, some prioritization should be followed and any deviation for PM works should be controlled via a PM variance control. No variation for safety-critical items unless agred otherwise.

We track what we call the "Bull Bar". This is hours confirmed in the schedule period on work which was not in the schedule and was not Priority 1 or 2 (1 = Break In Now and 2 = Break Into Schedule).
Area Coordinators have to explain the justification for working on "Bull Bar" jobs at the fornightly review meeting.

Note: we produce a fortnightly schedule not a weekly schedule. We consider the move from weekly to fortnightly scheduling the best improvement we have made to scheduling. It frees the work group for other activites other than continually working on producing the next schedule.

Bull_Bar.xls (26 Kb, 22 downloads) Example of Bull Bar KPI

Getting others to be accountable for their actions is one way to stop breaking the schedule. Here we are tracking break-in basically asking a few simple question to help establish accountability.

1. What job broke the schedule?
2. Why was it necessary for this job to take precedence over the jobs on the schedule?
3. Who authorized the break in the schedule?
4. Was it necessary for this job to break the schedule and if not how are we going to stop this from happening in the future?

There are several other factors that come into play when such as using equipment criticality, assigning someone authority to break the schedule, and establishing procedures are just a few of the things that can be improved to help people make the right decisions.

My question is what do you do to help stop unnecessary interruptions?

It is essential that management document the definition of what is acceptable "Break In Now" and "Break Into Schedule" work. This document provides the framework around which the questions listed by Waylon M can be asked. The document can also prevent conflict between operations and maintenance.

CRITERIA_FOR_BREAK__INTO_SCHEDULE_WORK.doc (26 Kb, 21 downloads) Criteria for Break Into Schedule Work

Waylon,

Can we see your procedure to control the schedule break in?