While wrench time rates vary by company, a typical average is 30 percent. That means in a 10-hour day, only 3 hours of actual work is being done. (Shame on us!) Several factors contribute to lackluster wrench time, including waiting on parts and materials or unexpected travel. But, all is not lost, proper planning and scheduling of maintenance can help alleviate this issue. In fact, a company that is properly planning and scheduling its work can see wrench time increase to over 60 percent.
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One of the most effective ways to improve plant maintenance operations and wrench time is to streamline your organization’s planning and scheduling work order processes. To reach optimization, you need a solid foundation of plant maintenance knowledge along with communication and accountability across departments. It’s no surprise that plant maintenance planning and scheduling is a not a “one size fits all” model.
Optimized planning and scheduling is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. It depends upon a few factors, including your manufacturing organization’s size; the relationships between maintenance, production, and procurement groups; and reversing the reactive work mode.
Here are four reasons why you should strive to optimize your organization’s planning and scheduling practices:
- Efficient plant maintenance practices enable resources to achieve more with less
- Proactive scheduling of production processes reduces equipment failures and helps to ensure that plant maintenance work is planned according to priorities and synchronized with production schedules
- Using SAP as the foundation for plant maintenance planning and scheduling safeguards company data from becoming compromised due to incompatibility with other non-real-time programs, such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project
- Scheduling in a reliable application inside SAP helps avoid the loss of organizational knowledge when workers retire or leave the organization
To summarize, it’s about being proactive.
Plant maintenance planning and scheduling helps alleviate reactive situations such as when a rush priority job loses its urgency after materials arrive on location. Studies have shown that reactive work costs companies three to five times more than planned work. That hurts! With a real-time work order scheduler, you will have the knowledge and ability to communicate immediately with multiple departments, such as production, to reallocate resources to other jobs.
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Also, proper SAP plant maintenance planning and scheduling eliminates the need for your company to hold an excess inventory of parts and tools and allows you to cancel requests for permits that are no longer needed. Having greater visibility into the in-house inventory will enable you to use parts and tools now freed up from previous work orders on future work orders. Also, being able to search on long text in SAP to find parts required for a repair greatly minimizes the need for free text input. And, with all departments using the same real-time application, you can quickly and easily schedule jobs and coordinate and minimize downtime with production.
With the right solution and efficient coordination of available materials, tools and resources, your company can improve workflow and save time and money. Now, we can all appreciate the value in that!
