Planner Training:
Turn an Exercise in Frustration into an Opportunity for Lasting Benefit
When companies hire maintenance planners, their decision may be spurred by competitors or peers, or they may have heard that planners “fix maintenance systems.” Unfortunately, maintenance planning is a complicated subject and it must be adapted to the particular situation of every facility. Without proper training, planners often accomplish very little, yet hiring companies generally do not have the proficiency to perform that training.
Performance Consulting Associates (PCA) has the solution to this problem: A challenging, intense, yet highly participatory training program―with an individual improvement plan for each participant―proven to promote better maintenance planning and scheduling performance.
The action-based curriculum is suitable for all levels, reinforcing best practices and offering new insights to veteran personnel and increasing the competency of new planners, front-line supervisors and technicians who may perform planning functions.
The training focuses on best practices for six fundamental activities within the production environment:
- Work identification and control
- Job planning, including repetitive work preconfiguration
- Job scheduling
- Materials coordination
- Preventive/predictive maintenance
- Outage coordination
These customized, interactive workshops include a combination of 1-on-1 and group activities; classroom instruction/lectures and in-plant training; and practical exercises that illustrate a wide array of planning and scheduling concepts used in plants throughout the country. Focusing on practical application, we actually take planners into the plant and show them how to take live work orders out of their system, plan work efficiently and incorporate relevant workflow and compliance documentation for materials acquisitions, safety, permits and more.
A core component of the effort―and one of the key differentiators between our training programs and those of our competitors―is training in the value of repetitive work documentation. During the in-plant sessions, we illustrate for planners the importance of job planning packages―and we teach them how to use them. Among plant activities, 95% of work is highly repetitious. Once these tasks have been planned, planners can build a library of “job packages” that can be used over and over again, streamlining workflow and promoting best-practices standardization.