Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Unit Cost Reduction

Plant capacity can be increased by putting the ‘hidden factory’ to work.  The ‘hidden factory’ is all the production capacity lost due to the unnecessary waste of operating time and production rate.  It can total to more than half of the plant and equipment capacity in those organizations that are not aware of their time and production wastes.

To find the size of the ‘hidden factory’ it is necessary to measure actual performance against the maximum rated potential of the operation.  The difference between the two - maximum possible and actual achievement – is the size of the ‘hidden factory’.

 This slide shows a graph of how the ‘hidden factory’ can be spotted.  It indicates the seven causes of waste that produce the ‘hidden factory’.  All the lost production and the below-full-capacity production represent the ‘hidden factory’.  The message for Preventive Maintenance Planners is that the work they do preparing for maintenance aids in recovering and preventing lost production by giving the maintainers the best opportunity to do high-quality work that improves plant reliability and extends the run-time between failures.

This Figure shows when plant operating costs are committed.  It indicates that up to 95% of operating costs are predicated, or set in place, during the capital phase.  By the time a plant goes into operation, there is little that the people operating and maintaining the plant can do to change operating costs.  During the operating phase of the life cycle, the focus is to minimize operating costs to the very lowest levels achievable with their plant and equipment.

The Maintenance Planner contributes to this least-cost-of-operation goal by making sure people and resources are minimized and used wisely for the greatest benefit of the enterprise.  Hence why the primary purpose “to gain greater work utilization from the rest of the maintenance mechanics” is so important.

It is important to realize that operating costs can only be changed and removed during the design and project phase of the life-cycle.  Once plant and equipment are in place, all its associated requirements must be met.  Those necessary costs cannot be lowered without increasing the risk of failure by reducing the item's reliability, with subsequent poor effects on production output.

The Maintenance Planner can do nothing to change what happened during the project phase, it is all history by the time they work in the business.  But they can change the project decisions to be made in the future if they capture good, sound records of the performance and costs of the production equipment used in their operation.  With believable evidence of equipment performance provided by the Maintenance Planner, future project designers will make better decisions in designing and selecting a future operating plant.

Interested readers can download all 229 slides with instructor notes at 'Maintenance Planner Scheduler Training Course'.

Maintenance Planner Scheduler Training Course' above should link to :- https://bin95.com/ppt-powerpoints/maintenance_planning_training.htm