Maybe you have too many planners. If you are trying to plan everything you will need supermen on your planning dept/section.

We plan our PM (Preventive Maintenance) jobs.
We do detailed planning for turnarounds and shutdowns planned/unplanned

If somebody wants to paint a piece of pipe, he has to deal with the maintenance section supervisor.

I guess the question is how detailed should be the work order planning process? For CM works, sometimes it's easy to identify the scope of work and thus spare parts required but sometimes not so easy. Spending a lot of times on walkarounds won't reveal so much sometimes until after opening etc. Regardless of this, we still try to plan and schedule CM works as much as possible for resource optimization and solve chanllenges encountered in the process.

If it's not so clearcut, why don't just just book the likely materials to be used but Store don't issue yet, only gathered into squrrel cages ie to be "on loan" by craftmen and issue the actual quantities in CMMS after use and the rest returned to their original locations after cancelling the reservations for unused materials. I guess this should be considered part and parcel of the work process vs expensive costs of craftmen or can use planners to deal with this if the craftmen can indicate which materials used and unused in their work reports.

By squirrel cages, I mean buckets or containers dedicated for each work order containing their parts required, for craftmen to carry & to return them later, not satellite warehouses.

Another option is to must return spare parts unused ASAP to avoid replenishment but at zero inventory value which normally pleases the Store.

If the above procedural control is in place, I think may be no problems even if the scheduled works are on hold. If the materials are still in the squirrel cages, they still appear in the inventory (not issued yet) and thus available for other works after confirmation with the first person/work order reserving them.

How to prevent I&C (Instrument & Control) from stocking? Do you use min/max stocks for I&C parts & consumables? Do you have various price agreements with suppliers to supply spare parts on "fast track" especially on I&C parts? They will tend to keep spares in their drawers if the quotation & delivery takes ages. Do you have BOMs (Bills of Materials) for I&C equipment? If yes, are the material specs properly specified in the CMMS to avoid ambiquities in spare part ordering & thus fast delivery?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Josh,

Thanks for all the replys.

We do have too many planners now, because until a few years ago, the planners were "gofers" with almost no planning experience, and we haven't figured out all the details in our process. I agree the right level of planning is essential, but we feel ALL work should be at least evauluated for planning. Some work takes none; other work takes a lot. By planning work (right time, right work, right tech, theoretically) we have minimized emergencies. 3 years ago 90% of our work was reacive, now it's about 25% of the work orders we do. It's a mind set that's hard to instill, but if the maintenace department insist on EVERYONE adhering to the priorities they agreed upon when we put in our work process (not CMMS, but work process) in place, it can work.

I'll list our planner expectations below; would be interested in what other planners are doing.

As reactive work decreases, we're increasing the PM and PdM; at the last plant I was at, we got reactice work down to less than 15% in 5 years.

Here, though it's not working completely yet, we have been able to reduced head count by 16% through retirements, and we have taken a worker out of the force for outage planning.

In the mean time, we have reduced total backlog to the lowest level in 18 years.


Planners here:
Evaluate work orders for validity
Walk down and scope work to determine likely needs
Lay hands on parts before saying "ready to schedule"
Write requests for equipment clearances and custody
Estimate job hours,parts, and recommended job steps
Copy instructions , drawings, or sketches to the work order work package to save crafts people searching through books
Build next week's schedule to use at least 80% of available person hours; two weeks schedule out to use 40% of available person hours, and three weeks schedule out to use 20% of available hours.
Present the schedules to Ops, Engr, and Management in a weekly 30 minute meeting for concensus on importance to the plant and coordination among crafts.
turn over the work and work packets to maint supr.

Thanks Again, Gordon

Oh, I forgot the question on BOM's. This plant has never had them except for informal histories on work orders sort of tied to Entities (EID's to most of us). Now that the CMMS is up and running, We've hired a firm that speciallizes in this work to build all BOM's. Giving that job to a soon-to-retire worker or one on light duty always meant it was a backburner activity, so we believe in the long run it's cheaper (less expensive?) to bite the bullet in get in done in one year......

Thanks.

How many planners you have, how many maintence responsibility centers (MRC), total maintenance workforce including permanent contractors.
Just to have a rough idea

There is something in your planning cyclus that is too long. Although the warehouse is accountancy terrain, The "Operations Manager" is almighty, probably because it is a "Power Generation Company"

Overstocking and Accountants is an explosive mix, but if they have the attitude to order what the "computer" says...