I’m guessing that your answer is yes, implying first that you are doing some maintenance.  But that will be the topic of an upcoming article.

Assuming you are doing maintenance on your equipment, you are most likely facing planning challenges because planning maintenance is not easy. It requires a lot of rigour and discipline. Rest assured, you are not alone.

After several years managing maintenance departments and helping SMEs, here are the challenges that stand out the most.

• Communication between maintenance and production.
• Teamwork between maintenance and production.
• The production schedule constantly changes.
• Availability of equipment.
• You do not know how long each maintenance will take.
• There are too many emergencies so you do not have time to plan.
• Having a good maintenance planner in your team.
• You do not have a parts inventory and you do not know what parts you have.
• You do not know which parts are critical and which you should have in inventory.
• You do not know what is the impact of not having the right parts.
• You do not have a maintenance management software, so maybe several Excel files that are not linked.
• It is difficult to make reports from your Excel files, therefore difficult to analyze and improve.
• Your maintenance teams do not have all the right skills.
• You do not have skill matrices and training plans for your maintenance people.
• You do not have good feedback from your maintenance teams:
  • Was the work well prepared?
  • Was the estimated time to do the maintenance sufficient?
  • Are there parts to order and other work to plan?

Are you living similar challenges? If so, contact us, we know how to help you!

You may ask me what should you do to successfully plan your maintenance and overcome these challenges? Be there for our February article to see the answer.

In the meantime, take note that our blog will take time off in January. We wish you happy holidays! See you in February.