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Machinery & Equipment MRO
February 2022
CMMS: MAIN THING FOR PLANNERS TO KNOW
The main thing about planners using a CMMS is they must use the job planning module.
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lanners are actually “craft historians that personalize information we learn on assets over the years with asset-specific, living job plans.” We just call them “planners” because it’s easier on the tongue. Nearly every CMMS has a job planning module. They all call it something different. - Maximo calls it the “job planning module” - SAP calls it “tasks lists” - Oracle calls it “benchmarks” - INFOR calls it “standard work orders” And so on. Many implementers of CMMS train that this module is where planners make reusable plans for jobs that we do a lot,
especially PMs. However, we do almost all maintenance repetitively in the long run. Therefore, we should plan nearly every job in the job plan module. If we perform maintenance on an asset today, there is a 50 per cent chance we will work on that same asset again within the next year. There is an 80 per cent chance we will work on that same asset again within the next five years. We work on the same things year after year. Why would we want to rethink the plan each time? Every CMMS has a job plan module and we should therein make living plans just about every time we plan a job. Another way to plan jobs would be to research history each time we plan a job. However, that is not the way to go. If we look at the work order history of a partic-
ular asset, we see that one time we used one rubber gasket, one time we used two Teflon gaskets, and another time we used one Teflon gasket. How would we plan this next job? We cannot simply consult history each time we plan a job. Instead, we should be creating and improving a single living job plan as our “current state-of-the-art” plan. It takes extra time for the planners to plan in the job planning module and then import the job plan into the work order. It would be less work for the planners simply to create the job plan directly on the work order itself. But after diligently using the job plan module, surprisingly, after about six months, planners suddenly start seeing that they already have a job plan for about half of the incoming new work orders. In the
Photo: everythingpossible / Adobe Stock
BY DOC PALMER
