Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook Quotes

“It is interesting that the concept of wrench time is why plants can increase their productivity, but they do not have to measure it. And they should measure schedule compliance, but they should not care about the score.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“Relevant to planning and scheduling, available and reliable plant capacity is a y, encountering less reactive work is a y, completing more proactive work is a y, and even increasing labor productivity is a y. Plants have to be careful about overly focusing on KPIs for them. But plants can make themselves do planning and scheduling because they are x’s, and plants can also make themselves generate (not complete) more proactive work, which is another x. This chapter makes extensive use of the concept of y = f(x) to explain the KPIs for best planning and scheduling performance.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“expectations and force better coordination between operations and maintenance to avoid delays. These efforts lead to wasted time rescheduling each day in the natural churn of daily maintenance and do not increase productivity.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“Much of industry mistakenly believes that the objective of planning is to create “perfect” job plans with “perfect” time estimates and the objective of scheduling is “to complete the schedule.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“Another aspect of the scope involves TLC. TLC is not “tender, loving care,” but “tightness, lubrication, and cleanliness.” Terry Wireman (1996) points out that not operating at design speeds and not maintaining the basic conditions of cleanliness, lubrication, and tightness contributes to 50% of all breakdowns. That means that if a plant had a backlog of 400 serious equipment deficiencies, a large number could have been eliminated through proper PM in this area.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“Scheduling The CMMS provides another benefit to the planning department with regard to manipulating scheduling information. An advance schedule should normally be a simple allocation of work and a daily schedule should involve the supervisors’ personal knowledge of crew individuals for best work assignments. Nevertheless, a CMMS might facilitate some of these efforts. In addition, the CMMS allows easy “what if” reviews of different alternatives. The CMMS also allows easy “publication” of the schedule to anyone interested. This promotes better craft coordination as well as coordination with the operations group for equipment clearances. Some commercial CMMS systems are weak in that they do not understand the wide variance of individual job time estimates (±100%) and think “a 5-hour job should last 5 hours.” Therefore, they guide the scheduler to drag and drop individual names and individual jobs throughout the entire next week to specific hour or even day time slots. Of course, the real-life incidence of wide job time variance plus the real-life intrusion of new, urgent operator requests make such overly detailed advance schedules of little value. In fact, many plants that use them find themselves in long daily meetings just to rearrange the schedule continuously.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook

“Deming condemns management’s ability to deal with issues that arise from the shop floor.”
― Doc Palmer, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook