Scheduling Best Practices with Christine Banham

Scheduling is one of the key pieces in Maintenance and Management. When you are working on a piece of equipment vigorously to meet your production goals, some problems now and then are bound to occur. Now, these problems need to be fixed in time. This is how a maintenance job starts. When a job is created, it is planned and then needs time and resources to be completed successfully. That s where scheduling comes in. The job of Maintenance Scheduler involves gathering all the information about a job, make sense of it, and then coordinate with all the related department to complete it just as planned.

In this episode, we covered:

  • What Scheduling is
  • Best practices for effective scheduling
  • Difference between Scheduling and project scheduling
  • What are the challenges in scheduling
  • And much more!

The very first step in scheduling is to get a buy-in with every department which is involved in the planned maintenance. A scheduler needs to have good relations with everyone in the maintenance facility to build a communication channel. Everyone should be on the same page before resources are allocated and tasks are assigned to the team members. The maintenance jobs usually involved management, operations team, engineers, technicians, and planners. This cross-functional team where there are people from every department needs someone to guide them because not everyone has been in the field.

Some of them are in the actual maintenance work facility for the very first time. That s where the operations department and the technicians play a huge role. They are the ones who spend their entire days working on that equipment that you are trying to maintain. Their insights are valuable and they are the ones who have to make sure that the equipment is available for inspection at the right time for as long as needed.  Their feedback can help you take care of necessary inspection and safety checks. That means your schedule will be modified at times.

Then the maintenance team needs help as well. Their concerns and questions help you plan your weekly schedule. They might be struggling in the facility and taking care of their needs goes a long way! The people who manage spare parts and warehouse teams play a huge role when it comes to having the right parts available at the right time. Their input regarding warranties and equipment returns provide you with the input that may be vital. There needs to be open communication to successfully schedule and implement a planned work order. There are different tools that are helpful in scheduling but the excel spreadsheets are used the most.

Where excel helps you greatly with updating information and analyze some of the data, it has limitations. It might be an easy way to get around the data but CMMS is the best way to plan your compliance in the way that you can stay ahead all the time. Having a precise analysis report and updating your CMMS at times can help you with proactive maintenance. The last but not the least, there should be well thought out KPIs in place to evaluate your weekly progress and then improve you planned or unplanned work.

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