Maintenance Managers, you know the drill – Keep the equipment running and still, somehow, get your maintenance done.
On a 5-day schedule, this typically means Maintenance “maintains” during the week and “repairs” during the weekend.
When a plant shifts to 24/7 operations, the first thought of maintenance people is “Where do we go now?” The weekend, once reserved for maintenance, is now being taken up by production.  Is this the end of preventative maintenance? Will maintenance now be restricted to small windows of opportunity such as line changeovers? And the biggest question is “How will we schedule maintenance people when we no longer know when we will have access to equipment?”
To get to these answers we first need to break down maintenance into its three main components: (1) Corrective Maintenance, (2) Preventative Maintenance and (3) Project work. We will cover all three of these here.
Corrective Maintenance
On a 24/7 operation, everything is running all of the time. While there are plenty of exceptions to this (change-overs, sanitation, etc.) we’ll consider production to be spread uniformly across all hours for this discussion.
Since corrective maintenance is not “scheduled”, it can be nearly impossible to predict with any accuracy. Therefore, we should consider an “event” requiring corrective maintenance to be random. That is to say, it is equally likely to occur at any time during the week. Under this type of condition, it is best to spread your resources around equally. From a corrective maintenance perspective, it makes no sense to staff differently on Saturday afternoons than on Wednesday nights.
When it comes to staffing levels, maintenance managers will have to take into account things such as: (1) the likelihood of something breaking down, (2) the opportunity cost of delaying a repair (3) the cost of overstaffing when those people could be used more effectively elsewhere and (4) the availability of additional resources through callouts. Overstaffing the corrective maintenance crew is a mistake often made. Maintenance managers need to realize that there will never be enough people to always ensure there is enough coverage for every possible contingency. It is better to have an effective plan for augmenting your crew in an emergency.
Preventative Maintenance
Surprisingly, Preventive Maintenance is actually easier to accomplish on a 24/7 schedule than on a 5-day schedule. On a 5-day schedule, you are essentially committed to “pit stop” maintenance. You only have a very little window to fix everything so you throw all of your resources at it during that time. Hopefully, you get enough things fixed so the plant can run well the next week.
On a 24/7 schedule, you still have maintenance to do, but you no longer have to do it all on the weekend. Now you can spread it out during the week. For example: instead of trying to repair all production lines on Saturday (typically an impossible task), you now take down one line at a time; leaving the others up and running. Maintenance personnel rather do preventative maintenance during the day shift on weekdays. Not only is this the preferred schedule for your people, but it is also when you have the most resources available. On Monday through Friday day shifts, you will have greater access to vendors, parts suppliers, and engineers.
This all points towards scheduling as much preventative maintenance as possible during Monday through Friday day shift. Of course, there should always be preventative maintenance assigned to other shifts throughout the week so maintenance people will be productive if there is no corrective maintenance needing their attention.
Project Work
Project Work is like preventative maintenance in that it is best done during the weekdays when the most outside resources are available. Unlike preventative maintenance, project work often requires several consecutive days or weeks of work to be accomplished. It is best started, maintained and completed by the same people to minimize any loss of information during turnovers between crews. To do this, you will want to use 8-hour workdays where the project people come to work and advance the project every day, five days a week.
In summary, maintenance scheduling for a 24/7 operation opens up new opportunities that allow for better schedules for your maintenance employees while improving overall maintenance accomplishment and equipment reliability.
Give us a call today and discuss how we can help you get the most out of your maintenance department in a shiftwork operation.
Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005.