Do You Need More Wedding Planning in Your Plant Outage?

So lets talk about really solid outage planning and scheduling. Not the half-hearten effort that I sometimes see organizations pass off as planning and scheduling, we want to see the good stuff.
Imagine if you will, a wedding. It could be yours or your kids, but think back to that process. Here are just some of the key pieces that were crucial to creating that special day.
Scheduling starts early with all big life turnarounds:
You picked a date for execution of the plan. Hopefully, it was not a reaction to a problem that was brought to your attention during the previous week and instead was scheduled well in advance (a year) and with the full agreement of all parties. It hopefully was picked based on resource availability and with the agreement of both members of the operations team, the bride and groom.
Budget bound:
A high level budget was created based on either what you were willing to spend, what you had available, or what you had been allocated from the parental organization. This at first is an order of magnitude or a not to exceed number that you broke down and further detailed as the planning process was completed.
Experts do what experts do:
Unless weddings are a particularly interesting past time for you then you probably lacked experience in certain areas or may not have had the resources to do all the work internally. For those areas you might have hired an expert. Experts could include professional wedding planners, musicians, tent and table erectors, chefs, photographer, and florist. These people do not always work well together so the coordination was key. For instance if the photographer arrived to do his work before the tent erectors or the florist you could have a real problem on your hands and face embarrassment, lost time and money. That is where the detailed schedule has to be defined and followed.
Planning and then Scheduling:
With all the additional labor needed and all of the task that must be completed in a timely manner you more than likely first built a simple plan and then with time expanded on that plan with detailed steps or task for completion. That plan included pre-work items that had to be done in advance and items that would be executed on the day of the event. The plans included all the important details like what songs to play and what foods to serve. All of these could then be sequenced into the schedule and a critical path review could be performed. Normally here in the US people are not prepared to attend a wedding where it takes two days to complete the ceremony because some forgot to tell the caterer that it was a mid day wedding. Getting all of the activities completed in a 4-6 hour period is important. The critical path tells us if that is possible with the choices we have made. So both time and money become limiting factors that must be attended to. Since we know time lets look at money.
Request for Quote (RFQ) budget refinement:
If you are like me, once you decided on the date, time, and the location and the types of expert that you needed you began to get bids and and built a more complex budget with allocations to each part of the event. There were trade offs and discussions until you finalized the monetary side of the plan. Do you spend more on the dress and less on the flowers? Can we get a DJ instead of an orchestra?
At the two week out point you review the job plans, evaluate weather and family risk and put mitigation strategies into effect as required. Aunt Suzy did not want to set next to uncle Carl so you updated the seating plan one last time. You verify completion of the pre-work and you mentally prepare for the big day by meeting with your operations partner. At this point you cross the final gate and green light the event knowing that it is the best that it can be. 
Your outage should be no different. Everything you see above should be done in the plant too.
Remember all this planning went into one 4-6 hour day and your outage may be a week or even longer. Are you planning and scheduling like a wedding planner or do your weddings aimlessly go on for days?

Tips for Your Scheduling Process Via Video

Today I thought I would share with you a video post on maintnenance scheduling with a few tips for taking your planned jobs and generating the most effective schedule.

So is it a Planner, a Scheduler, or is it a Planner/Scheduler?

Recently, I had an interesting conversation about staffing the maintenance planner and scheduler roles with in a facility. The question was centered on whether a site should have the two disciplines split or if they should be combined. The answer in my mind is… it depends.
Here are my thoughts on criteria that affect the planner/scheduler organizational structure:
Size of the maintenance workforce:
If you are in a small facility it becomes very hard to support standalone schedulers. For that matter, it is hard to get one person dedicated solely to planning and scheduling. To put some numbers to it I would suggest that in an average maturity facility you will need one planner for every ten to fifteen crafts and one scheduler for every fifty crafts. The number of planners you need may drop as you mature and the job plan library is populated and refined but the scheduler will stay at a fixed level.
Reliability maturity of the facility:
More mature organizations can pool more of the crafts and share across multiple areas for maximum resource efficiency and utilization. If you share resources across multiple areas then that can be a good reason to have a standalone scheduler who devotes his time to working with all of the effected parties and creating a schedule that they can all support.
So if you consider both of these factors than it becomes a bit easier to design your organizational structure but you must keep in mind that as these size and maturity change your structure may have to change as well. 
What are your thoughts?

The Basics of Reliability Series: Work Execution

This post is the first in a five part series that will include single point lessons that can be used to further communicate each of the topics to your organization. 

Work execution management is the full process that has to occur from the time a problem is first discovered until it is planned, scheduled, and repaired, failure history is collected, and the work order is closed or completed. This process is the backbone of reliability improvement; without it, it is very hard to see results in most of the other areas. For example, if you implement predictive tools without a good work process, all you get is a lot of identified work with no way of having it completed efficiently and effectively.

 Work Execution Management Single Point Lesson Figure 1

We will use the WE single point lesson (see figure 1), which includes the funnel model for planning and scheduling and the as is and to be reengineered model, to help individuals understand the following key points.

Forecasting work is not easy, but it is a required part of a successful work process.

Work approval processes are important for control of maintenance spending and to ensure best resource utilization.

Ready and Total Backlog concepts help maintenance managers to control staffing decisions with science instead of emotion. Planners and managers must be communicating constantly in order to properly provide for the Ready Backlog.

The funnel model also shows us where in the process we will develop effective work procedures and how we ensure that particular process has the correct inputs.

The WE single point lesson illustrates what the schedule output looks like and what inputs must be provided, including details from both operations and maintenance inputs of resources, downtime, and priority.

Last but not least, it drives the need for the process to ensure nothing is left out or missed. This process reengineering is shown as a big wasteful “as is” block that is refined into the more concise and direct “to be” block. Metrics are used to drive this change and ensure the return on investment.

We get all of this from two simple graphics that you can draw and share in a matter of minutes. 

Best Practice is not Good Enough: Are You Moving Toward "Future Perfect"

I was listening to an individual talking about business and improvement this week and he said a few things that resonated with me. I thought I would share them today in the context of reliability improvement.

Improvement initiative should move all elements toward the perfect state not just better than the competition or better than your sister plant or even best practice. He acknowledged that it may be unattainable financially or otherwise but it should still be the point you strive for. Many organizations map their currents state process and then make only the smallest of tweaks to these processes calling them the future state (because they believe they are already pretty good ). In the ultra competitive business environment what they really needed was a step change in performance to remain in or regain the highly profitable top spot.  If the same organization were to compare against the perfect state they would realize more of the possibilities available to them leading to better overall results.

So that got me to thinking what are some of the “future perfect” states of reliability and what could we learn from them…

Zero Unplanned Downtime\Zero Breakdowns

All work is planned and schedule.

Through the use of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Reliability Centered Maintenance RCM) the site could move closer to this state of zero unplanned downtime by eliminating the reoccurring failures with a failure mode based maintenance strategy.

Zero Parts Inventory

In a fully planned and scheduled world parts can arrive in a just in time (JIT) manor. In this perfect state, parts arrive to the job site just minutes before they are needed. Now we have eliminated the caring cost of all the spare parts that would normally reside only on the books and in the store room.

A perfect balance of labor and required work backlog

Many facilities shoot for 10-12 percent maintenance overtime to ensure that they have enough people to get the volume of the work done without having too many idle hands when the backlog is light. What if we could eliminate the need for overtime because our plans were so accurate and our schedules were so exact that we were left with a balanced equation every time.

What others can you think of? Even though you can’t necessarily attain them all how does the “future perfect” change your perspective of what is possible?

Thanks Rich MacInnes for spurring the thoughts!

Never Met a Maintenance Manager that had Enough People

Of all the sites I have been in all over the world, I have never met a maintenance manager who said to me “You know Shon I just have too many people.” In fact most ask me how they should go about bringing more into their fiefdom. It usually sounds a bit like this: “I need to hire planners, supervisors and a few more crafts in order to improve my reliability. If I could get support for more I could make this happen.”

Interestingly, the data tells me something entirely different. The average facility in our database is spending forty percent too much on maintenance. A portion somewhere between forty and sixty percent, depending on the industry, of that overage is labor. They are maintaining a wrench time, craft time doing value added work, of twenty three percent against a best practice of sixty-five percent. Think about that number a second, if you have twenty five craftsmen at twenty three percent wrench time that yields five point seven five FTEs (Dedicated fully utilized resource). On the flip side if you take one of those craftsmen and provide him the tools and training required to be a quality planner and scheduler then you can improve your wrench time to a very sustainable fifty-five percent. Now even with one person out of the craft ranks you can yield ten point four five FTEs without an overall head count increase. That is a eighty-one percent productivity increase… Image what that would do to your work backlog…and this is only one step to attaching high maintenance cost and unreliability. We could also talk about preventive maintenance optimization as well as others steps to provide additional gains. I'm a visual guy so here is another look at the math.

Now we know that it takes time to make the transition to the higher level of performance and that not every site is truly overstaffed but if you don’t think long and hard about wrench time productivity before you think about increasing your staff you could be doing both you, your company, and the person you hire a disservice. If you trust the benefits of planning and scheduling, the capability of your staff and you take the time to build a plan to get there you can do actually do more with less.

How Long Does it Take to Build a Race Car?

If you ask me how long it takes to build a race car I have no idea, but I know you can put four tires on in under thirteen seconds. The point is if you are going to properly plan and schedule your work you need to break it down into smaller discrete task that you can accurately estimate and then build the job estimate based on those task estimates. Accuracy goes up exponentially when you estimate the elements and not the whole project at once.
Those of you who watch NASCAR racing see many of the best practices we seek personified in the race teams. They plan every step of their process and schedule all of their pit stops for maximum success. They practice to remove the wasted time from each step of their process and they kit all of the parts and tools they need for maximum speed. Because of all these best practices and the team work they display they can do a full four tire pit stop in just over thirteen seconds. 
If you want your team to perform like a race team then remember to create accurate plans and estimates which lead to more accurate schedules and better team work.