Planners Toolkit: Reusable Job Plan Data Base

The transition from a reactive environment to a proactive approach to asset management requires, in most cases, a substantial transformation. The process of how work is communicated, documented, approved and prioritized is essential to ensuring effort is managed effectively providing the results in key areas.

During a functional communication session at the latest EAM/CMMS conference I attended there was some good conversation regarding job plans and safety plans. The overall consensus was... in order to understand the health of a backlog each approved work order must be planned with in an reasonable level of accuracy. The topic of backlog management quickly attracted more support and evolved to an after-hours discussion.  The topic of discussion, and debate, moved to the use of reusable job plans to help manage the work order backlog. It seemed to be clear, gauging the interest, many sites struggle with qualifying resource needs and the management of process assets to ensure a healthy consistent environment.  However many recognized resulting actions of  insufficient maintenance practices, impacting performance leading to reduced reliability of resource groups as well as operational assets. They were struggling with ideas on how to better understand their backlogs and the ability to make decisions based on priority, effort and duration. One stream focused on the creation of a reusable job plan database were the Planner could review the initial scope as described, select an accurate job plan from a database, insert and update upon site review. The premise being more time spent in the Unit than on the computer typing. The small efficiencies gained result in consistent planning language, format and required field population for reporting. Planner KPI's can track variances and help manage resource allocation and numbers. With all Work Orders "Planned" to a reasonable +15/-10% accuracy rate it is quite easy to determine base crew numbers, identify specific Work Orders that can impact the backlog and trend backlog utilizing resource hours. The caveat is that all scope still needs to be reviewed and a site visit is required. The reusable job plan is to be used as an efficiency tool with the intent of balancing desk time with time on-site validating scope, time, labor/nonlabor resources, materials and support requirements.