Reliability Engineering for Maintenance

I thought this tool may be of use to you all. Please feel free to distribute to anybody and everybody who is interested in the area of improving productivity and profitability in asset management.

In all the projects that I regularly undertake, implementing capacity scheduling is often among the quickest to get results.

It also acts as a nexus for many other areas of reliability.

Correct implementation of capacity scheduling will allow your company to:

• Drive out inefficiencies in workforce utilization
  
  
• Better manage risk through executing optimised maintenance regimes at the frequencies that they need to be scheduled at
  
  
• Strengthen the relationships between the planning and scheduling professionals and the supervisory staff.
  
  
• provide the basis for just-in-case inventory management.

I hope it is of use to you.

Cheers,

I think capacity planning should be part of a CMMS rather than stand alone. I see the connection between the first three bulleted points but how can capacity planning provide a basis for just in case inventory management?

Hi Josh,

I couldnt agree more. Capacity scheduling is something that should be done in an integrated CMMS where you have automatic control over:

• Employee abscence management
  
  
• Auto generation of maitnenance regimes
  
  
• Auto generation of routine maitnenance parts orders, and the generation of parts orders for certain dates once the schedule is set.

The tool here is in no way trying to say that shouldn't be the case.

I had to develop this for a client for a specific application, thought it was okay, (Not great just okay), and thought that there may be others who could benefit from it, so here it is!

How does short term capacity scheduling provide the basis for just-in-case inventory management? Let me explain my thinking here, I know there are a number of threads on this subject which I haven't read so others are probably talking about this also.

Within Asset-intensive companies just in case inventory management is about holding the right level of stock for desired level of performance and risk within the plant. I don't think there is any disagreement there.

Determining the "right" levels is where things obviously become quite complex, there are a range of variables to take into account generally:

• Consequences of the failure mode that that parts are used for. (Often termed "criticality", by well meaning but incorrect people. )
  
  
• lead time of the parts in question
  
  
• demand rates for the parts
  
  
• economic trade off analysis regarding holding costs versus failure costs (tied to the first point obviously)
  
  
• other options such as vendor held stock etcetera etcetera

And a whole range of oher items that I don't think it is relevent to go into here. Where capacity scheduling fits into this is that it provides the data for accurate historical demands of parts.

(If you accept the argument that there is only capacity scheduling. Any other form of scheduling that doesn't take into account the availability of resources is probably more of a wish list than a work program)

By ordering parts for corrective works on the time that they are actually required, rather than ordering them and having them sit in a lay-down yard for months, as well as correctly ordering the maintenance routine parts on their required frequencies, we are feeding the CMMS with useful data.

This data, along with other data such as the list earlier, becomes the spine of the re-order point and re-order quantity algorithms within the CMMS.

As a side issue, there are some significant errors in trying to manage a just-in-case store based on historical information only. As Resnikov pointed out in his early work in this area, there are some natural flaws with this thinking.

• There is not often the volume of data that we need to accurately make such probabilistic decisions, and
  
  
• Even when there is, there are always rarely occuring high impact failure modes that are not managed out of historical information only.

Sorry Josh, I digressed there a little. But does this answer the question do you think?

Best regards,

Yes. you answered my question. However I don't see materials inside that scheduler of yours.

Josh,

You are correct they aren't there. I have developed one that does similar for both materials and resources and I can post this in the next few weeks.

However this model is only a "quick and dirty" capacity resource scheduler. I only put it here in the off-chance that it would be of use to some people out there.

Best regards,

Interesting work Daryl, for the crowd out there who don't have access to a full blown CMMS, which have these functions embedded, it can be an eye-opener that a CMMS is more then just punch in a list of equipment and everything will be alright

I am curious to see the parts application.

Thanks Steven,

I have a range of one-shot spreadsheets that I will post here over the next week or two. This is what I do for a hobby strangely enough.

I hope to have a sawtooth analtsis tool for inventory levels this afternoon from something else I am doing. it may also be of interest. (And maybe an availability recording sheet)

I don't think any of these are going to save the world or anything, but they are great as training tools, stop gap measures and I enjoy them.

Best regards,

Steven

Not the inventory scheudling tool that we spoke about, but it may be of some interest to you.

Best regards,

Thanks Daryl, I have downloaded it already from an other thread. By the way you are not the only one with "strange" hobbies

Kindly regards