Richard Palmer and Associates

Richard Palmer and Associates has produced the award-winning Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook (MPSH) Scheduler to speed creation of a weekly schedule using the methodology of the handbook. The spreadsheet allows you to compile the best schedule for each crew’s labor hours in a matter of minutes.

The MPSH Scheduler is simply an “app” for your company’s CMMS. Although the scheduling process outlined in Chapter 6 can be easily executed with paper forms, the MPSH Scheduler is simply an Excel spreadsheet with some macros to manipulate the work orders.

Instead of spending three or four hours manually scheduling at the end of the week, the spreadsheet allows you to compile the best schedule for each crew’s labor hours in a matter of minutes. You can then print out the schedule for each crew or send them an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet even prepares a SQL of the schedule you could use to select out the work orders in the CMMS itself.

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The accompanying presentation shows the relative benefits of planning versus scheduling maintenance work. Effective planning and scheduling both depart from traditional views of either activity.  continue reading…

Evaluating maintenance performance with schedule compliance helps plants manage effective and efficient maintenance. This presentation uses cause maps to illustrate common causes of low schedule compliance and then relates a manufacturing facility’s specific experience with schedule compliance, specifically within a coal-fired steam generation unit. continue reading…

It really is all about scheduling. Planning work orders alone does not improve productivity because of Parkinson’s Law. This law states that work expands to fill the time available. This means that without some schedule guidance, we wouldn’t increase our productivity simply through having efficiently planned jobs available to us. continue reading…

The accompanying chart shows the six principles of maintenance scheduling. The principles are not so much fundamental issues as they are part of a framework. The principles cover the craft skill and time estimates from job plans required, the credibility of the priority system, the week as the proper advance timeframe, the filling of 100% of the labor hours, the role of the supervisor in the daily schedule, and the measurement of schedule compliance. The third chapter of the handbook thoroughly covers these vital issues of maintenance scheduling and the chart itself fills the inside back cover of the handbook. continue reading…

Empowering maintenance crews and personnel means allowing them to make decisions within their areas of responsibility.  This greatly increases the quality of maintenance work.  However, empowering does not mean turning each of the specialized areas of maintenance loose on its own.  The maintenance process takes a coordinated team effort to master and an explicit scheduling process is necessary to advance productivity.  Superior maintenance requires both empowerment and scheduling.  This paper explains where and how high performing maintenance organizations utilize and leverage each concept. continue reading…