Within a company’s planning department, there are a series of critical tasks that must be meticulously executed to achieve its objectives. One of these tasks falls to the maintenance planner.
What does a maintenance planner do?
The main function of the maintenance planner is to determine the tasks to be performed, when they should be carried out, and how they should be done.
In general, the maintenance planner is responsible for:
- Develop a maintenance plan.
- Update equipment technical information, specifications, and spare parts lists.
- Establish and maintain a fluid communication channel with production areas, operators and supervisors.
- Manage the volume of the maintenance backlog.
- Focus team efforts to reduce non-productive time.
Here’s an introduction to what it takes to create a maintenance plan.
From strategy to action
Within the company’s organizational chart, HVAC maintenance management is responsible for developing the strategy and general guidelines that the organization must follow to achieve its objectives.
However, the maintenance planner is responsible for implementing this strategy, organizing all the resources at his or her disposal. To do so, he or she must create and execute an action plan aimed at meeting the goals defined by department management.
Risk factors for maintenance planner management
The duties of a maintenance planner may be influenced by the size of the company in question, the needs of the team, the company’s strategy, and organizational culture factors regarding the division and distribution of tasks to be performed.
However, it is not possible to determine a model applicable to all professionals in this position. For this reason, and to avoid doubts about which tasks are the responsibility of a maintenance planner, it is necessary to establish criteria that help specifically define their scope of action.
How to define the work of the maintenance planner?
A professional dedicated to planning maintenance in a company must respond to three interrelated areas of action that aim to have a complete understanding of resources, management of task execution and the equipment involved in the operation, and measurement of results and accountability.
The areas we mentioned and their particularities are the following:
Information gathering
- Analyze assets – This basically involves understanding the equipment at your disposal, considering its materiality, manufacturer recommendations, and operating details.
- Performing a diagnosis using a FMEA – When diagnosing a failure, the maintenance planner must be able to analyze a set of key indicators. Ideally, it should also be possible to achieve a level of detectability. To achieve optimal results, it is recommended to perform this type of diagnosis using the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) method.
- Process the information – The collected data must be organized and stored so that the maintenance planner can determine what to do and how best to accomplish the work.
Execution and control of work
- Design instructions – Once the information gathering is complete, the next area of action is to define work guidelines, guiding each worker on the procedures they must perform.
- Balancing tasks and goals – The maintenance planner must establish a relationship between maintenance tasks and production goals. The key is to align the needs of both departments, creating a mutual information exchange channel that ensures the flawless operation of physical assets, in line with the company’s goals.
- Schedule maintenance – Once the above is defined, it’s necessary to plan when to perform maintenance. This is only possible when the condition of the physical assets and the available time windows are known.
- Managing the work team – The person responsible for maintenance planning must also have control over who will perform the tasks they design and assign. This will allow them to determine who to assign each task to, once they evaluate each worker’s performance, knowledge, and experience, and to organize and direct the team.
- Provide work materials – As a facilitator, the maintenance planner must calculate the amount of material needed to perform each task and request its acquisition in advance.
- Relationship with contractors – It is common to need external personnel to perform tasks. Therefore, the ability to plan and manage this support is required, considering timelines, integration with the plant team, and alignment with the company’s standards and objectives for efficient execution.
Measuring results and accountability
- Reporting – In your role of bridging management and the technical department, there is a wealth of data about the work performed, which must be gathered and organized to then produce reports that are then sent to managers, who evaluate performance with the rest of the team.
Support from CMMS or maintenance apps
Throughout the areas related to a maintenance planner’s work, handling a huge volume of data and critical information is ongoing.
For this reason, technological solutions exist, known as CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems). This software can be designed according to the client’s specific requirements and supports maintenance planners in making their work as efficient as possible.
Among the possibilities offered by the development of this type of tools is the ability to:
- Gather and organize critical information that helps the manager, technicians, and maintenance planner gain detailed insight into assets.
- Issue work orders that incorporate this information , providing the technical team on the ground with the greatest clarity and relevant data to carry out their work.
- You can diagnose non-automated or low-priority equipment through a work order, or you can use IoT-based solutions when diagnosing automated equipment.
- Automate work orders that allow you to assign responsible parties and add precise instructions on procedures, warranties, tools, parts, materials, and other information for the execution of the work.
- Incorporate safety protocols into work orders , helping the maintenance planner provide technicians with all relevant safety information and procedures, while ensuring compliance and review of work through the application.
- Task scheduling , allowing the maintenance planner to anticipate and make available to the team the necessary resources, considering the established objectives and committed delivery times.
- Tool control to determine materials , tools, parts and safety equipment that must be assigned when issuing a work order to the team.
- Manage work teams , regardless of whether they belong to the company or external, assigning work based on asset type, experience, or other criteria.
- Real-time reporting allows for the reporting of work and the presentation of information related to the entire process contained in a work order to management, contributing to the company’s decision-making process.
- Create all types of automatic notifications that alert the team about the occurrence of faults in real time and on critical dates, such as task execution, warranty expiration, or routine inspections.
- Visualization of key KPIs that allow both management and the maintenance planner to measure the performance of the entire operation through data and statistics on all critical aspects related to maintenance.
Read Other: Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO): The Backbone of Operational Efficiency