on Maintenance Reliability

“Gremlins today” is a series of short articles on problems that plague industrial operations the world over.

Originally, Gremlins were fictitious mischievous trouble makers who caused Royal Air Force aircraft breakdowns during World War II. Author Roald Dahl published a book about them in 1943, based on his own experience as an RAF pilot. Pilots in the RAF used to carry lucky Gremlins to ward off their effects. Dahl worked with Disney to publish a cartoon book based on them, but it never made it into a movie at the time. Never-the-less, it did loosely inspire the 1984 movie, “Gremlins,” by Steven Spielberg.

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Are you having trouble producing good quality maintenance job plans?
Is your “standard job” plan library nearly empty?
Is your planned work running below 65% (bottom quartile)?
Note: scheduling without a plan, isn’t planned, and failing to plan is planning to fail!

With maintenance costs burning up to 30% or more of your operating costs (depending on industry) there can be a big benefit from reducing those costs. Every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line, and upwards of 20% (sometimes more) can be achieved by doing a good job at maintenance work management. But many companies don’t even come close. At the heart of their problem is their approach to maintenance planning. Not the planners! They do their best but are often untrained and unfamiliar with good practice in planning.

However, even if your planner are well trained, they can be easily side-tracked by parts chasing, purchasing, schedule shuffling and even standing in for supervisors!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now come to planning!

If you are a planner, don’t worry. It won’t take your job, but it will help you become a superstar planner!

We all know that maintenance plans are critical to efficient work execution and keeping a lid on costs. Planners create those plans and then go on to schedule the work when it best suits the organization.

Creating maintenance job plans requires a great deal of knowledge and insight into parts, tools, trade skills, lifting apparatus, and so on. Only a planner on site has access to it all, because only he can actually see where the work will be performed. However, creating job plans is a lot of work. The average fully trained planner who is actually dedicated to planning (not scheduling), can produce maybe 4 or 5 good plans in a week. With hundreds or even thousands of jobs to plan, he can be planning for his whole career. Using old Work Orders as a sort of template helps, but planner productivity can still be low.

Introducing artificial intelligence to generate draft job plans quickly, gives the planner a huge boost in productivity – how about 40 good plans in a week, instead of 4 or 5? Combined with proper use of your CMMS / EAM’s capability to save standard job plans, your operation can rapidly move away from low single digit % planned work to reach benchmark levels > 95%. That can boost worker (trades) productivity from 30% (typical) to nearly double that. Considering the skilled trades shortages and trouble hiring them that everyone is experiencing these days, that’s a huge spin off benefit!

Conscious Asset has teamed with Perspect Analytics and Cato AI Solutions to create AIJobPlanner(tm). This cloud based tool takes seconds (up to a couple of minutes for very complicated jobs) to generate draft maintenance job plans that include: tasks / activities complete with sequencing, timing, resources (parts, special tools, materials, trades) all that are needed to complete the job. It automatically searches the web and our library for technical manuals and other information relevant to the equipment you specify. Our advanced tool will also accept input of your  site specific information such as technical manuals, Bills of Materials, etc. The tool produces a very comprehensive DRAFT job plan in seconds.

Caution: These DRAFT plans are very complete, but they still need review and possibly editing by a real planner. That effort to review and edit takes minutes, not the hours it usually takes to create a new plan from scratch.

Click here: aijobplanner.net To see the tool, a demo that loads automatically, to sign up for a free trial, or as a Beta Tester.

We are accepting up to 100 Beta Testers and have some special offers to make it more enticing for you to try the tool. Use the link above or the QR code below to go to the Beta Test site and sign up. Click on the “sign up free” button at the upper right of the screen. To get the special offers, we only ask that you try it, and give us your feedback.

The special offers are:

• For the first 20 testers: free basic subscription for 1 or 2 users for first year. $720 savings.
• For testers 21 to 100: 50% off basic subscription for 1 or 2 users for first year: $360 savings.
• For all 100 testers: If you want more than the “basic” subscription, we will also give a substantial discount on Premium or Enterprise subscriptions. Since these require multiple user setup, just ask us if this option is of interest to you and we’ll set you up.

If you like the tool, here are our subscription plans:

• Free – for a single user to give it a test ride (limit of 10 plans)
• Basic – for a smaller scale operation, with 1 or 2 people planning maintenance work, with a limit of 500 plans per month. Available with credit card payment: $60/month.
• Premium – for a larger site, with up to 10 people planning, and unlimited plans. Can create up to 50 custom templates and up to about 100,000 pages of your own technical documentation for the AI to use in creating your plans. Can pay with credit card or use PO. $500/month.
• Enterprise – for very large sites, or multiple sites, with more than 10 people planning and unlimited plans. Can create up to 1000 custom templates and up to about 5,000,000 pages of your own technical documentation for the AI to use in creating your plans. We can also include the ability to search your existing Work Orders (additional cost). Requires a quotation, PO and custom set up.

The reality: Savings in work execution can easily be 30 to 60% of what you are spending today! That’s less labor, less overtime, less contracting, less consumption of parts and materials, less spend on delivery logistics, and less procurement activity. If your maintenance costs are in the range of 10 to 30% of your operating spend, you can save 3 to 18% of your operating labor costs by focusing on maintenance planning, scheduling and improving your proactive maintenance program.

The myth: many believe that planning and scheduling will solve their maintenance productivity problems, so they focus efforts to improve them. But despite their efforts, results don’t change. Time and again, we see reports showing relatively high levels of planned work but low schedule compliance, and production outputs don’t change. What’s going on?

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