How to optimize the planning of maintenance activities ?

An objective: the planning of maintenance activities at the service of the performance of the assets of the company. Let's start with the obvious: maintenance activities are necessary to guarantee the sustainability and performance of the assets of the company (machines, equipment, production lines, etc.). Publishers have also understood this well and have developed technological solutions (as IBM Maximo) which, associated with IoT, make it possible to optimize this asset management.

The fact is that planning of these maintenance activities often remains the "thorn in the side" of organizations. The Lack of one of the main problems encountered by. But there are simple solutions that are easy to implement...

The 3 (theoretical) levels of planning maintenance activities.

There are a certain number of ways of planning maintenance activities that can be imposed by the structure of the company, the industry of activity, or the complexity of the equipment to maintain. The term "planning" also resonates in different ways depending on whether the organization seeks to concentrate all operations in a short period (example: annual shutdown of a production unit), while others want to geographically optimize the movement of their technicians.

In general, we can cite three planning levels, each of which has very different objectives:

• The first is the "Budgetary" level. Its objective is to validate the adequacy of the capacity of the installed equipment in an annual or even multiannual, with a monthly distribution of the available workload (installed equipment) based on assumptions of load distribution between the Corrective  and the preventiveto
• The second is the level "Prevision". The objective is to generate the preventive interventions and inspections in a period appropriate to the activity, as well as the planning (in the sense of programming) of the corrective interventions already present in the portfolio. It is important at this level to integrate all operating constraints as soon as possible to ensure that the schedule is as close as possible to what will actually happen.
• The latest is the “Operational” level . Its objective is preparear, coordinate and assign interventions to technicians/agents with a weekly or fortnightly horizon. It is also about managing all daily contingencies (lack of spare parts, unavailability of a resource, urgent breakdown, etc.).

In practice... Each actor has a different maturity at each planning level. But,  do all organizations always manage to implement these 3 levels...?

Not so obvious... It often happens that maintenance departments focus (too much) on unscheduled maintenance (also called corrective / reactive), to the detriment of preventive activities , which over time leads to a vicious cycle and can lead to tensions between departments.

Obtaining a sustainable and quality maintenance activity for operations requires good planning and adequate programming of interventions (preventive and corrective).

For this, an effective cooperation is needed between the maintenance department and the operations department to clearly define all production restrictions and the most favorable periods for maintenance work. However, we often observe that those responsible for planning sometimes do not have a simple and ergonomic tool to carry out these tasks and the necessary arbitration; This is tedious, a source of errors or misunderstandings, and even expensive.

A solution: a calendar dedicated to planning, ergonomic, shared and integrated.

Talan has developed for its clients a calendar solution dedicated to the planning of maintenance activities.

Simple and ergonomic, it allows, without changing the environment, management the assignments, in particular thanks to a drag & drop function (drag & drop)...Fully integrated into the CMMS, can be available quickly for to obtain an immediate ROI.

Our goal is to provide to the means to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency that is looking for! This will also be the subject of a future article accompanied by a short video presentation of our solution...