Planning and Scheduling are essential to achieving low costs and high wrench time with your maintenance work management process. Without it, you will be rushing to repair breakdowns, scrambling to find parts and materials, missing needed information, and your workforce will be jumping from job to job, work will be rushed and chaotic, overtime, and likely contractor, costs will be high, you won’t be getting your PMs done. Your operations will be unable to sustain stable production levels, deliver products and services in a timely manner. If you are running that circus you’ll be stressed – production, operations, and general management will all be unhappy with you. Your own maintainer workforce will be happy with the extra pay but unhappy with the instability.

Good planning and scheduling reduce the chaos. A single planner can keep up to 20 of your maintenance workers as much as twice as productive as they in that chaotic state. It’s like finding extra workers without hiring! They will be happier if they can do their work well and without disruption. You will be able to forecast parts and materials requirements better, so chasing of parts will be reduced. Your need for rush shipping and premium pricing on parts will be reduced. You will find the time to get your PMs done. They will reduce the incidents of breakdowns. A stable working environment is safer and you will be able to deal with problems while they are small, before they grow out of hand.

This is our “advanced” level course in Planning and Scheduling. This covers topics that will help your planners get from being merely good at their jobs to great at them. It covers advanced topics like managing changes, long term planning, and long-range materials forecasting. If you are doing good planning but still struggling with wrong parts, poor documentation, shutdowns, and MRO materials or you haven’t quite got truly out of reactive mode, then this is for you.

This course earns 0.77 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for successful completion.

If your planners and schedulers are new to planning and scheduling, then they probably need our Planning and Scheduling – Basic “course.