Planning and Scheduling Best Practices

This white paper explores planning and scheduling best practices in regards to asset maintenance. Planning and scheduling processes impact both maintenance and reliability, which can directly affect uptime. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, their definitions are distinct.

Maintenance refers to the actions necessary to maintain or restore an item’s operational condition or to improve its condition so that it can fulfill its intended functions.

Reliability, on the other hand, is the probability that equipment, machinery, or systems will perform their required functions satisfactorily under specific conditions and within a certain time period.

Maintenance productivity is directly impacted by how work is planned and scheduled. Maintenance managers tend to overestimate the effective maintenance time of their craftspeople to be 45-55 percent of their day.

In reality, analysis has shown that only 2.5 hours of an eight-hour day represents effective maintenance time, on average, and it’s worse in locations that are reactive.