Asset Management Press

Why Do Implementation Efforts Fail? First, let’s look at the overall implementation. Even if you implement a proven and tested maintenance planning & scheduling process, there are 2 key reasons why you would still fail during implementation. Reason…

The 13 Maintenance Planning Mistakes
Beyond poor implementation, many organisations make critical mistakes in the maintenance planning & scheduling process itself. Here are 13 common mistakes you need to avoid during maintenance planning:

Mistake 1: Picking the Wrong Person as Your Planner
Many organisations fail before they even start by choosing the wrong person for the planner role.

The maintenance planner is one of the most critical roles in a maintenance organisation. A good planner increases workforce productivity, makes sure jobs are properly prepared, and reduces waste. A bad planner leads to poor job plans, inefficiencies, and frustration.

Among other things, planners must have:

The right attitude – They must be proactive, detail-oriented, and committed to improvement.
Strong technical knowledge – While they don’t need to be the best technician, they must understand maintenance processes.
Organisational skills – Planners must coordinate materials, tools, and resources efficiently.
Get this wrong and you’ll end up with poorly prepared work and an ineffective maintenance planning process. As a result, the productivity of your crew won’t go up or not by much. In fact, it could even go down.

Mistake 2: Not Training Your Planners Properly
Even if you hire the right person, they won’t be effective if you don’t train them properly.

Planners need to understand:

How to use the CMMS
How to develop detailed job plans and work packs
How to source materials and parts
How to collaborate with schedulers and supervisors
Without proper training, planners will lack consistency and create low-quality job plans. This will negatively impact the work of your technicians and ultimately affect your team’s productivity.

Mistake 3: Using Your Planner as a Relief Supervisor, Expeditor, or Troubleshooter
One of the biggest, and most common mistakes when it comes to maintenance planning is that, in many plants around the world, maintenance planners aren’t actually planning.

Instead, planners often end up being a combination of a planner, a relief supervisor, an expediter, an administrator, and an all-around troubleshooter. And guess what? When you ask a planner to do all that, he or she won’t be spending much time planning.

That means you’re not going to get the productivity gains that you’re looking for.

So remember, a maintenance planner must never work for the current week. A maintenance planner must always be working for future weeks.

Mistake 4: Using Planners for Emergency Work
Planners should never be involved in emergency work. That’s the supervisor’s responsibility.

Because planners know where everything is, it’s tempting to ask them to jump in during a crisis. But every time they do, they’re pulled away from planning future work, which keeps the team stuck in reactive maintenance.

Make your maintenance supervisor accountable for emergency work. And just to repeat myself because it’s that important: remember that your planner should always be working for future weeks, never for the current week.

Mistake 5: Planning from Behind a Desk
Once your maintenance planner has been in the role for quite some time, a sense of “knowing-it-all” can slip in. It’s common for a planner to think:

“I know this job. I used to work on that machine myself. I know exactly what it will take to get this repair done. I can plan this job right here from my desk.”

Let me tell you right now: Always visit the job site.

There will always be things going on in the plant that might have changed the situation. And consequently, planner might miss some things that need to go into plan. That could be a safety issue or an access issue. Things change, and people sometimes forget. When you plan from behind a desk and you miss these things, you lose efficiency, you introduce waste.

So remember, planning is not a desk job.

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1.03K viewsKonstantin Zyrianov, edited 10:08