Maintenance Services

OUTAGE! The Planning and Scheduling Experience

Your organization is asking your maintenance departments to keep machinery running longer with fewer people, solve problems and reduce failures, improve reliability, implement new programs, execute professional shutdowns and outages, and do so at reduced cost. This can only be accomplished if the maintenance organization is efficient, effective and good at coordinating with production.

Professional application of planning and scheduling concepts is a critical maintenance business practice for achieving and maintaining a “world class” status for any maintenance organization.

With effective planning and scheduling, 30 maintenance technicians could yield the effect of 47. Thousands of man-hours can be harvested from non-value added activities so people have more time for training, cross-training, participation in RCM, safety programs, spare parts management, etc.

Planners provide significant benefits to a maintenance organization (backlog reduction, run-time improvements, material / parts availability, safety), but they cannot do it on their own. People throughout the organization – production, maintenance workers, contractors, supervisors, spare parts – impact the planning and scheduling function.

• If you want to launch a fresh round of planning and scheduling improvements...
• If you want to reinvigorate your planning and scheduling processes...
• If you have invested in planning and scheduling training and want an experiential skills practice session to reinfoce concepts...

...this is the experience you need.

OUTAGE! is designed for all personnel responsible for planning, preparing, and executing outages or extended maintenance repairs.

• Planners
• Supervisors
• Managers
• Leaders
• Production and Maintenance Personnel
• Procurement and Storeroom

Takeaways from the game include:

• Best practices in planning & scheduling and outage preparation
• Hands-on and highly interactive simulation
• Makes the case for change
• Helps to instigate a fresh round of improvements
• Builds momentum and enthusiasm
• Applies sophisticated learning principles to drive behavioral changes
• Identifies gaps and opportunities back at your organization
• Provides an opportunity to experience first hand the benefits of planning and scheduling
• A fun way for participants to put training to practice

OUTAGE! is fun, but it is also powerfully meaningful in the way it reinforces planning and scheduling concepts and best practices.

The game is an exciting, interactive 8-hour simulation that replicates a real maintenance outage with the typical problems of parts, manpower constraints, QC problems, contractor issues, scheduling dilemmas, work orders, safety issues, work identified late, risk assessment, etc.

The game is played by three teams of six to eight players. The element of competition works wonders. The facilitator usually needs to be alert and watch for sabotage and cheating.

Each team is given an identical set-up, including parts, work orders, personnel requirements, schedule conflicts, etc.

Playing the game:

Teams assess the backlog and the outage list and begin the process of identifying constraints, risks, preparation requirements.

Based on work order information and constraints such as personnel, contractors, the crane itself, parts, coordination issues, etc., the teams begin working on the schedule. They sketch out a rough Gantt chart and begin to find ways to use cycle time compression, lean maintenance, and parallel paths. Before long they are discovering their critical path and using critical path management techniques.

Teams will also need to kit, stage, and conduct quality checks on parts, materials, and tools.

They hold a pre-shutdown meeting to ensure they are ready-to-go and then all teams start the execution of the outage at the same time.

The winning team is the one that gets the most work done safely in the shortest period of time with the least amount of maintenance wastes and losses.