Leading Edge Planning & Scheduling in SAP

This paper presents the turning around of a mechanical maintenance planning department within a large municipal electric utility. It explains how planning leverages maintenance productivity and how its effect is quantified.

The specific principles necessary to make planning and scheduling effective are presented and the issues underlying each principle are identified.

The utility had a multi-faceted maintenance management improvement effort to insure continued maintenance effectiveness. This effort comprised areas such as communication and teamwork, storerooms, rotating spares, tools, tool rooms, shop improvements, training at all levels, equipment database and CMMS, PM, PdM, project work, and improvements to work processes. Many of these areas were mature and already contributing to the utility success. The most recent area to come into its own was planning and scheduling.

Company Vision and Planning Mission

Of course in one respect, a company should not want to do maintenance. Gifford Brown, Manager, Cleveland Engine Plants, Ford Motor Company, says it best:

"The company vision should be how to PREVENT maintenance, NOT how to do it efficiently."2

However, knowing that some maintenance is necessary, the utility counts work order planning as an important tool. Some of the primary aspects of planning are well known.

Work order planning involves identifying parts and tools necessary for jobs and reserving or even staging them as appropriate. As more was learned about planning, it became apparent that planning was also a system with many subtleties.

"Having the right jobs ready to go" sums up the planning mission statement. Having the "right jobs" involves job priorities, crew schedules, and work type (such as PM versus breakdown work). Having the jobs "ready to go" involves correctly identifying the work scope, considering the safety aspects of the job, and planning to reduce anticipated delays such as for instructions, parts, tools, clearances, and other arrangements.

The practical result of planning for the mechanical maintenance department where planning was implemented was 30 maintenance persons yielding the effect of 47 persons.

At this point, it must be stated that the benefits of planning involve quality as well as productivity. It is very dangerous to push for productivity if there is not a quality focus present in the work place.

Craft persons must have the attitude that work being done in a quality fashion is more important than meeting a production schedule. The individual on the floor must communicate concerns with the crew supervisor if more time is needed to complete work properly. Tangible quality savings come from improved availability, heat-rate, and safety in two ways. First, planning focuses on correctly identifying work scopes and provides for proper instructions, tools and parts being used thereby facilitating quality work. Second, productivity improvement frees up craft, supervision, and management time to do more proactive work. This proactive work includes root cause analyses on repair jobs, project work to improve less reliable equipment, and attention to preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance.

The reduction of delays is where planning impacts productivity. The majority of the maintenance budget is typically wages and benefits. Studies during the last four years in spite of high availability indicated that productivity of available maintenance persons was about 35%. That is, on the average, a typical maintenance person on a 10 hour shift was only making productive job progress for 3 1/2 hours. The other 6 1/2 hours were spent on "non-productive" activities such as necessary break time or undesirable job delays to get parts, instructions, or tools. 30 to 35% productivity was typical of traditional-type maintenance organizations. Yet it was clear that the significant overall cost of maintenance and the average of 6 1/2 hours "non-productive" time per person were opportunities to improve maintenance efficiency. Simply implementing a fundamental planning and scheduling system should help improve productivity from the 30-35% of a traditional type maintenance organization to about 45%. Then as files become developed to allow avoiding the problems of past jobs, productivity should increase to 50%. Finally, having other mature facets of maintenance such as a good storeroom, trained technicians, engaged supervision, and perhaps a good CMMS might even boost productivity to near 55%.

Taking technicians out of the work force to make them planners makes sense because a single planner can plan for 20 to 30 persons.

This ratio is well above the break-even point. If a planner could help multiply the productivity of a single technician by 57% (55% divided by 35%), the break-even point would be taking one of every three technicians and converting them to planners:

Without Planner:

3 persons at 35% each = 3 X 35%

= 105% total productivity.

With Planner:

2 persons at 55% and 1 planner at 0%

= (2 X 55%) + (1 X 0%)

= 110% total productivity.

The 30 person maintenance force is leveraged as 30 persons X 1.57 to yield a 47 person effective work force.