Maintenance work can be difficult to plan since it typically consists of two forms of maintenance: preventative and corrective.
Unplanned or emergency repairs to address equipment breakdowns or other pressing issues when they arise
Preventative or planned maintenance to maintain systems and facilities in top working order.
What is the best way to combine and handle these two styles of jobs? How should repair technicians and work hours be assigned in the daily calendar to ensure that all forms of work are completed? Many maintenance plans have changed over time and now concentrate mostly on failure and unplanned maintenance. Technicians are focused on putting out fires, and preventative scheduled maintenance suffers as a result.
Maintenance Planning Tips
As unplanned/default maintenance is unpredictable in nature, try buffering time to handle such work. Divide each day or week into maintenance periods based on category A (must be done), B (should be done soon), and C. (nice to do). Unplanned maintenance can be scheduled around the time of category C or even category B maintenance as needed. This can aid in the prevention of cascading maintenance issues and the associated continuous firefighting.
Include enough time and resources in the maintenance plan for regular preventative maintenance.
Divide and conquer should be the operating principle when dealing with any large multi-day, multi-team maintenance job.
Recall that estimates should be based on a person who does the job not on an expert’s experience. Inexperienced staff will take longer to finish a lot of jobs. An otherwise well-thought-out maintenance plan may be completely destroyed by unrealistic estimates
Build up, update, and check information in time when creating maintenance plans. If not, the first ones to be omitted would be these elements.
Compile the maintenance calendar of work by equipment and location to be done in the following month, quarter, or year. This can be useful for showing and talking to managers. Items may need to be reset or grouped together to reduce the time for maintenance or to identify conflicts due to production/operational deadlines for equipment being unavailable.
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