How Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Reduce Unit Cost of Production

The Maintenance Planner Scheduler job is much more than the preventive maintenance or repair person.

Don — BIN95.com
Industrial Maintenance
4 min readJan 3, 2022

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Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
Top-Gun Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

Follow Ted below, as he learns how to become a Top-Gun Maintenance Planner Scheduler in the excerpt below from the full Maintenance Planning and Scheduling course PowerPoint download. The course PowerPoint starts out teaching Ted that the Maintenance Planner Scheduler job is much more than being a preventive maintenance person or a maintenance repair person. As you will learn here in this second article from the MP/S course, the Top-Gun maintenance planner needs to learn the big picture first.

The above 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 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.

Hidden Factory Definition:

The Hidden Factory
The hidden factory is defined.

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 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’.

Do you want a deep dive into the ‘Hidden Factory”, also known as ‘The 2nd Yield? See REF: Change Management help for Maintenance Managers

Types of Manufacturing Cost:

Types of manufacturing cost
Types of manufacturing cost

The above 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.

Maximizing Life Cycle Profits:

Maximizing Life Cycle Profits
Maximizing Life Cycle Profits

It is important to realize that operating costs can only be changed and removed during the design and project phases 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 reliability of the items, 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.

I hope you like this share and share it with others. To read the first article in this series, please see Maintenance Planner Scheduler Job Description.

Or, better yet, download the whole 229-slide Maintenance Planning and Scheduling course PowerPoint.

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Don — BIN95.com
Industrial Maintenance

Don here. I am an industrial instructor specializing in industrial automation, but run https://bin95.com and its subsidiaries. (An industrial training company)