Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
    • About Us
    • Colophon
    • Survey
  • Reliability.fm
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • NoMTBF
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • ASQR&R
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Maintenance Management
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • RCM Blitz®
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Field Reliability Data Analysis
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability by Design
      • Reliability Competence
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
      • Reliability Knowledge
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Institute of Quality & Reliability
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Statistical Methods for Failure-Time Data
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Glossary
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinar Sources
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • Your Courses
    • Live Courses
      • Introduction to Reliability Engineering & Accelerated Testings Course Landing Page
      • Advanced Accelerated Testing Course Landing Page
    • Integral Concepts Courses
      • Reliability Analysis Methods Course Landing Page
      • Applied Reliability Analysis Course Landing Page
      • Statistics, Hypothesis Testing, & Regression Modeling Course Landing Page
      • Measurement System Assessment Course Landing Page
      • SPC & Process Capability Course Landing Page
      • Design of Experiments Course Landing Page
    • The Manufacturing Academy Courses
      • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Statistics
      • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
      • Quality Engineering Statistics
      • FMEA in Practice
      • Process Capability Analysis course
      • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
      • Return on Investment online course
    • Industrial Metallurgist Courses
    • FMEA courses Powered by The Luminous Group
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • How to be an Online Student
    • Quondam Courses
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home
  • Barringer Process Reliability Introduction Course Landing Page
  • Upcoming Live Events
You are here: Home / Articles / Trouble with maintenance planning?

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

Trouble with maintenance planning?

Trouble with maintenance planning?

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.

Filed Under: Articles, Conscious Asset, on Maintenance Reliability

About James Reyes-Picknell

James is the best-selling author of “Uptime – Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management”, now in its 3rd edition, co-author of “Reliability Centered Maintenance – Re-engineered”, co-founder and Principal Consultant of Conscious Asset.

He is a Mechanical Engineer, graduate of the University of Toronto and has more than 44 years working in Operations, Maintenance, Reliability and Asset Management.

« Company Acceptance of Hybrid PM is High Risk
Different Data Same Decision »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Conscious Asset series

Article by James Reyes-Picknell

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Posts

  • Gremlins today
  • The Power of Vision in Leadership and Organizational Success
  • 3 Types of MTBF Stories
  • ALT: An in Depth Description
  • Project Email Economics

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy