Many organisations are overspending on equipment and asset maintenance. Besides a lack of understanding of the value of a formal structure and best practices for maintenance planning and scheduling, maintenance managers are also being held back by a few key challenges that exist in many South African organisations, says Alusani® Course Leader Allan Tarita.

“A lot of companies aren’t leading with a vision or strategy surrounding long term maintenance planning. This strategy needs to identify planning and scheduling as a key focus area of the business; one that involves more than just a handful of people,” says Tarita.

Maintenance planning and scheduling requires your best resources Maintenance planning and scheduling needs to be a holistic process and it requires quality resources, such as experienced IT support, buy-in from key executives as well as experienced foremen. When a proper maintenance plan and schedule is in place, the entire
organisation benefits.

“The bottom-line is greatly affected when maintenance takes place on a proactive basis, as opposed to reactively. Besides increased profitability, the entire business benefits. Safety issues arise when people are doing reactive maintenance as opposed to proactive maintenance, for example. When every break-down is a crisis and maintenance personnel are constantly dealing with large equipment failures, then it leads to a frantic organisational culture that easily spreads throughout the entire business,” says Tarita.

There are a few ways that a company can go about identifying weak spots in their maintenance planning and scheduling systems. A third party, experienced maintenance planning and scheduling consultant can be hired for an inspection.

“This consultant would be able to compile a handful of quantifiable solutions that can be implemented. This professional site visit wouldn’t even necessarily be an expense to a business as good maintenance planning and scheduling consultants recover their costs through the fees that they are able to charge after their advice and recommendations have been given to a company during the inspection,” says Tarita.

Another option is to attend a well-structured course and learn the principles and processes involved in well-planned scheduling. “Doing the right thing at the right time will increase a company’s profitability – it’s that
simple.

These types of courses are ideal for management teams, not only engineers and foremen. It’s important for companies to understand that a team approach is needed if they want to ensure 100% compliance with maintenance planning and scheduling. Instead of continuing to focus on cheap, reactive fixes, many organisations’ entire cultures need to change to make sure that they are doing maintenance in a well-structured, quality fashion,” concludes Tarita.

Allan Tarita will be facilitating Alusani’s® CPD-accredited Maintenance Planning and Scheduling for Improved Reliability and Uptime on 11 – 13 October at Melrose Place Guest Lodge in Johannesburg and on 23 – 25 October at the Coastlands Umhlanga Hotel in Durban. For more information, visit www.alusani.co.za or email faith@alusani.co.za.