Fix Reactive Maintenance with Better Planning ft. Doc Palmer

Manufacturing Meet Up

Doc Palmer, author of McGraw-Hill’s best-selling maintenance planning handbook, joins Ed and Alvaro to talk about why most plants are leaving enormous money on the table without knowing it.

If your team is stuck in reactive mode, this one will reframe how you think about planning, scheduling, and the metrics you’re probably using wrong.

In this episode:

• Why “planner” is a bad word (and what to call it instead)
• The 35% wrench time problem that hits every plant on the planet
• What Parkinson’s Law has to do with your maintenance schedule
• Why 95% schedule compliance might mean you’re cheating yourself
• Real-world turnarounds from Dallas to Brunei

Mentioned in this episode:
Palmer Planning

Full Transcript

Ed Ballina I’m Ed Ballina.
Alvaro Cuba Hello guys, Alvaro Cuba here.
Ed Ballina And we’re here to welcome you to another podcast of Manufacturing Meetup. This is the show where we kick back, we talk about what really happens on the shop floor, and we get to learn from you, you get to learn from us, and it’s a lot of fun. So welcome to MMU.
Alvaro Cuba Yes. What’s about your…
Ed Ballina Oh the hat. So some of you may know that we’re moving into a new building, new to us anyway. And I wanted to put up a flagpole with the American flag.
Doc Palmer Thank you.

The Real Cost of Not Planning

Doc Palmer I’ve got an actual dollar figure I’ll share with you, but the problem is things break. And when things break, we’re not making product. And maintenance is maintaining. It’s not fixing things when they break really fast. It’s keeping them from breaking.

The industry rule of doing proactive maintenance: every extra dollar you spend on proactive maintenance saves you $10 on your bottom line because you’re keeping things from breaking, which helps you make a product.

Understanding Planning and Scheduling

Doc Palmer A better word is craft historian. What we want to do is use planners to run a Deming cycle. Plans are not perfect. They’re a head start. They’re like triage in a hospital.

The Impact of Reactive Maintenance

Doc Palmer Operators start complaining, then starts the fight with maintenance and finger pointing and all that. Operators appreciate us coming out there in the middle of the night and fixing something. But deep in their hearts, they know that’s not right.

Effective Metrics for Planning

Doc Palmer If you’re grading planners, you’re compromising your productivity. There are two metrics if I had to grade planners. One is every time they plan a job, they have to use the living plan module of the computer.

Real World Examples

I’ll give you four quick ones. In Dallas, the water system, they fully loaded the schedules and schedule compliance was 25%...In Hawaii, they were at 95% schedule compliance but they had a lot of reactive work.

Key Takeaways

1. Plans aren’t perfect, schedules aren’t perfect.
2. Understanding maintenance is key to improving productivity.
3. A balanced approach to scheduling will yield better results.