Podcast: Unleash your planner—Turning overwhelmed maintenance planners into strategic leaders

I often describe it as having 10 pounds of potatoes to put into a five-pound sack, and nobody’s happy at the end of the day. That’s a common starting point I’ve found. All the PMs are number one, all the inspections are number one, and then we’ve got this big outage next week that we have to get done. But again, here are some things I say you can start tomorrow to improve that situation.

One is the concept of asset criticality. I’ve talked about that before. If you have 20 assets in a plant, 20 production pieces of equipment, not all of them have the same priority. Some of them are used 40 hours a week, and some are running 24/7. Which ones are critical to operate? Well, you should give priority to those assets.

You can actually put a number on asset criticality. I won’t go into how to calculate that, but you can assign a priority number to each asset, and then resources can be aligned with those assets first. That clarity is very helpful.

Once you’ve got this big list of PMs and work that needs to take place next week, obviously, you need to do the safety ones and the environmental ones. But then there are some choices. Are there strategic things your organization is trying to improve? For example, at my plants, I said, “Hey, we want to go from about 50% compliance on lubrication to 100% every single week, every single month, the entire year.” That clarity means a lot to a planner. We’re going to do the safety and environmental work, and we’re going to put resources on lubrication because strategically, that affects so many things. Motor maintenance was another high-priority PM for us.

So, as a planner, try to get clarity on what are the critical assets and what are the critical PMs you need to execute, not just the environmental and safety ones, which are easy, but after that, what’s next?

Another thing I wanted planners to do is to look inside their own jobs. When planning jobs, don’t just accept the historical data: “We do this eight-hour PM once a month, three people.” Is that right? Maybe it can be done with two, maybe with one. Does it need to be eight hours? Why not four? Sometimes people put eight hours in just because it’s a full shift. That’s not how you’re supposed to do a PM.

Go in and look at the work you have planned for the next couple of weeks and say, “Hey, I’m going to plan this with two people, for four hours, and maybe every other month.” Can you adjust based on five years of historical performance? If nothing negative or positive has happened, it might be time to take a little risk. Change frequency, duration, or the number of people assigned. You can do that yourself.

I encourage planners to identify five of those adjustments each week. Send an email to the maintenance manager or involve an engineer or technician: “Here’s what I’m thinking. This saves 40 hours of labor every month. Does anyone have a problem with this?” Start the discussion. You’ll find a lot of low-hanging fruit.

I specifically target recurring work orders. If you find four hours of waste in a recurring work order, and it happens every week or month, multiply that by 12 or 52. Two hours of savings this week could multiply to a huge impact over a year.

There’s also duplication of efforts, especially inspections. You may be doing vibration monitoring, infrared monitoring, and then have a PM to inspect the same equipment. Maybe you can remove that PM since you’re already monitoring with tools, or maybe you can reduce the frequency from weekly to biweekly or monthly. There are many opportunities in a planner’s work to make improvements, but you have to tell the planner that’s their job, not just take whatever historical PM comes their way and execute it blindly.

Once you unleash a planner and say, “Your job is not only to plan this work, but also to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps,” you can do something like a PM Kaizen. For example, you could say, “20% of the PMs I’m looking at aren’t needed because we already have condition monitoring, and 50% have too many people assigned.”

Based on my experience, let’s do a PM Kaizen. Go to your maintenance manager, your maintenance organization, and suggest that. You could say, “Hey, let’s go after 200 PMs this week. Let’s focus on the ones recurring throughout the year and make sure we’re not doing wasteful work. Look at duration, people, frequency. Are they already covered by other means, like condition monitoring?” These are easy things to do.

Also, and I know this is hard, when someone says they’re overwhelmed, I tell planners, “Go out and observe one job this week.” I know it feels like you don’t have time, but if you’re a planner, I equate it to being an offensive coordinator on a football team. You’re calling the plays, setting up plays, designing plays, but if you’re not able to watch the game, you can’t tell if it’s working.

Go watch one job. Did they have the right parts? Was the equipment handed over from production at the right time and in the right condition, or was it stored in the wrong location? Did they get the equipment an hour late? Did they have the wrong parts, the wrong oil, or a missing torque wrench? Craftspeople spend a lot of time looking for parts. Observe at least one job a week. You’ll need two to four hours minimum to do this properly.

The next thing I’ve found powerful for planners is putting in place a kitter/stager. This is usually an experienced technician or mechanical electrician. Take someone with 15, 20, or 30 years of experience and say: “This is a planned outage for a month from now. I want to build up all the parts, pieces, and supplies needed for that job in this basket. We’re going to verify it, stage it in the work area, and before the job gets executed, we’ll verify it again.”

You wouldn’t believe how much having a planner or kitter/stager can increase wrench time. I’ve seen it go from 15% to 30%, effectively making every crafts person twice as productive. Through years of observation, I’ve learned that craft people spend enormous amounts of time looking for supplies and parts. If you pre-verify and stage everything, they don’t have to do that. It’s a tremendous tool.

Lastly, let’s talk about planners themselves. Sometimes, and I don’t see this often, the crutch is, “Do we have enough planners?” Most people say, “We need to hire more planners.” That’s usually the first action. But these other five or six steps I’ve mentioned should come first. There’s a lot of waste to address.

You could have one planner with 50 craft people, all working on outages instead of recurring PMs. That’s not going to work. So what’s the craft-to-planner ratio? There’s no magic number. If your PMs are optimized and 90% of what your craft people do is standard work, one planner can manage 30 technicians easily. But if it’s all unique outage work or specialized equipment with rented or purchased parts, one planner may struggle.

There’s no perfect ratio. You have to see the type of work your planner is handling. You may need to hire another planner. And if you do, the payback can be tremendous. A planner earning $100,000 with benefits could easily return $1–2 million to the business.

A planner’s job isn’t just to get work executed efficiently. It’s also to make the most effective use of the people you have. Asset criticality is important, but you can also improve the work itself. A Kaizen is a great idea. Involve others—engineers, technicians, maintenance managers, even operations staff. Look at the 1,000 PMs executed during the year. Can you reduce duration, frequency, or labor? That’s where you can find real improvements. Can we whittle that down—duration, frequency, number of people assigned? I have found gold in there. One success story for me: we had a PM Kaizen, and we eliminated 100,000 hours in a year. That’s the equivalent of freeing up 50 full-time people. And it took about two weeks of Kaizen work to achieve that—50 people freed up for eternity. Big deal.

So there you go. That’s a couple of my thoughts on what a planner could do. Other than adding people at the very end, everything I mentioned was free.

PS: Everything you said was free. Great list. I have one follow-up question. You’ve touched on the ways a planner interacts with many different parts of the organization and depends on other departments. How can management in other areas help planners gain control and maintain a proactive maintenance culture long-term?

JK: First, helping planners get involved starts with recognizing what they do. They’re not just an expense or a necessary evil. They have a critical role in making sure all requests from operations and maintenance are completed logically and efficiently.
Back to asset criticality: we need to provide planners with guidance. If I have 10 tasks to do next week but only enough people to do five, which ones do I pick? That guidance is critical. Planners also need the understanding that they can improve the job. Their role is not just executing work; it’s executing work efficiently.

Too many planners I’ve seen think their job is, “We have an eight-hour outage next week; we’re going to replace this pump and gearbox. I buy the parts; it’s on a skid; four mechanics will do the work.” That’s not a planned job. That’s ordering parts and creating a schedule.

A planner’s job is to figure out how to get the job done most efficiently. The best planners I’ve seen used to be craftsmen. They know how the work needs to be done. They think about the equipment: “We need this one-ton mobile crane; it will make the job smoother. We’ll assign these three people, pull them in a week ahead, review the LockOut Tag with them, and make sure there are no surprises.”

They also discuss the job with the team: where parts are located, how they see it going, questions the crew might have. That’s the full role of a planner. In many organizations I’ve walked into, planners are just schedulers and parts expediters, and that’s not enough.

PS: Great advice, as always. What I take away from your list is that most planners are overwhelmed because of a lack of clarity. Asset criticality and prioritizing key assets are essential. When everything is your number one priority, nothing really is a priority and not much gets done.

The other point I really like is that a planner shouldn’t just accept the work order history. Their job is to investigate and improve those jobs each time. Over time, that becomes a historical record of improvement, rather than just passing one work order on to the next.

JK: Yeah, absolutely. And if you imagine if the planner just did one of those a week, just improved one of the tasks that they are planning. Do one a week, but then you’ve got 52 in a year, and then you’ve got 104 after two years. It really adds up. Small steps are, what I would think is important here. Don't try to reinvent what the planner is doing. Just make that one improvement this week, right?

PS: Okay, as always, great advice and little small steps that our listeners can start tomorrow. Alright, so for our second part of this podcast, we typically raise questions that are often career related, but generally more personal, so listeners get to know us a little better, and it's often about more than just manufacturing and maintenance. So our question today is about reinvention. Joe, have you ever had to reinvent yourself or your approach mid-career or really any time in your career? What sparked that change? Was it an easy process, and was it worth it in the end?

JK: Yeah. I think we all have these moments, and I could probably list three of them, but the one that relates to reliability and maintenance is this: my career started off as an engineer for about three years, and then I went into operations management. That could be considered reinventing myself.

I was doing management work, but it wasn’t until 2003, 16 years into my career that I was introduced to reliability and maintenance best practices. At that time, I was an operations leader, and it was “operations versus reliability” at my plants. That’s a whole other topic, right Anna. But I wasn’t really driving reliability and maintenance best practices until 2003.
Then in 2006, I had a major role where I was accountable for driving maintenance improvement. If you look at my career for the first 19 years, it was operations, operations, operations. Then suddenly: maintenance.

Why the change? Operations already had so many best practices in place. They were implementing Harvard Business studies, Lean concepts were huge at our plant, and I was pretty good at that. But I realized there was a huge gap in leadership for driving change in maintenance organizations. Maintenance was far behind operations in adopting best practices.

When I worked in a commodity business, making aluminum. It sells on the London Metal Exchange—you know what you’re going to get for it, but not what it’s going to cost to make it. For 100 years, Alcoa worked to improve operations. But how many years have we really focused on improving maintenance best practices? Almost none.

So I fell in love with reliability and maintenance. It was a neglected area with great people, technicians, planners who wanted to do a good job but didn’t have leadership guiding them from current state to best practices.

I eventually became the director of reliability and maintenance for the company for four years, even though I wasn’t originally a maintenance guy. I then retired early to do coaching and consulting in that space. I’ve written a book about this transition from operations to maintenance, because I saw the gap and wanted to help close it.

I’m so glad I made that change. I love the maintenance people, the enthusiasm, and the expertise in that area. But I’ll say this as kindly as I can: there’s a huge void of leadership in maintenance. So if you’re looking for career advancement, it’s ripe. Very ripe for someone willing to take risks, fail, and try new things.

I’m excited I made that shift. Now people think of me as a reliability and maintenance expert—or as a retirement guy—but most of my career was actually in operations.

PS: Well, we're so glad you're a maintenance and reliability guy too, because we're so glad to have you back here every month.

Alright, so reinvention. This is a really interesting question for me to answer, because honestly, a career in magazine publishing over the last 20-plus years has almost been a state of constant reinvention.

My first job in B2B publishing started in September 2008. If you remember what happened that year and month, I don’t remember the exact date, but it was right when the bottom fell out of the economy. I think I started my job a few weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse, which really kicked off everything.

Interestingly, I was hired to work on two different magazines. One of those magazines I never wrote for, because it basically went under. These were publications for the recreational boating industry. One magazine was for boat dealers, and when the economy collapsed, 40% of boat dealers disappeared. The entire industry shrunk, so that magazine just went away. The other magazine was for the marina and boat yard industry, which I did work for. I stayed at that magazine for over a decade.

That magazine was eventually sold to a new publisher about four years after I started. And that’s always a big transition—getting acquired. Print was still pretty strong back then, about 15 years ago, especially for those industries. But the last 10 years have truly been a whirlwind. I think for most print publishers, many of us have transitioned very well to a digital environment, and there are still plenty holding their own in print for sure.

As far as reinvention goes, I don’t know an industry that knows more about it than ours. Personally, I’ve been acquired twice by different publishers. If you’ve ever been through a reorganization, you know it’s quite an ordeal. I guess I do get bored easily, so maybe that makes me more comfortable with change, and I just roll with it.

Joe Kuhn: Yeah, I agree with you. The print industry has just been a whirlwind. It’s amazing to see that transition and how fast it is.

PS: Yes, it’s still changing.

JK: A buddy of mine used to work in a newspaper, and now nobody gets the newspaper anymore. I get it on my phone, but I’d say one out of five of my friends even gets the newspaper that way. Fifteen years ago, everyone got the newspaper delivered to their house. What a change.

And magazines—I still enjoy Plant Services magazine. I’m 61, and I still like touching things on occasion, but most of my content is consumed online.

PS: Yeah, as is ours.

 

 

 

 

 

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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