The Maintenance Planner's Real Job

Hiring a maintenance planner can set a maintenance shop back. 

I see it too often.  As soon as a planner is hired, techs stop making parts lists.

Because that's planning, and they want support.

Techs are overworked. They want a planner so they can stop doing paperwork and get back to the floor. That's how it should be... right?

Nope.  If you're doing it that way, you're better off without the planner.

Making parts lists... that's not a planner. That's a very expensive assistant for a technician.

Here's what too many shops get wrong about the planner role:

The planner is not there to make parts lists for a bunch of correctives.  There are certainly parts lists a planner will make, but that's not the job. 

The planner's primary deliverable is to make sure today's problems are gone or mitigated in the future.

The planner (and the rest of the maintenance admin team) is your organizational learning engine. Their job is to take what went wrong yesterday and convert it into the 5 tasks that actually make things better:

1) PMs that prevent recurrence (if it can be prevented or inspected/detected.)

2) Stocking decisions that cut response time (if you lost time because you didn't have it, you should put one on the shelf.)

3) Job plans that document information gained or training requirement changes, (if your team couldn't figure it out, you better save the knowledge you gained.)

4) Machine modifications that remove failure modes (these are good work orders because they prevent future work.)

5) Tool purchase decisions that prevent jobs from being difficult, (if it takes 3 tries because you don't have the right tool, buy the right tool.  5S it when it shows up.)

That's the work. That's the value. And none of it happens if you bury them in parts lists.  But it still gets worse.

The tech was there. He pulled the cover. He saw the problem. He knows what needs to change. Having him hand off a layman's description so the planner can reverse-engineer the part number is one of the best ways to waste time and order the wrong components.

Parts can only be called accurately by part numbers. Every other method introduces unnecessary error. 

I have seen a planner disassemble something that was already disassembled in a PM to check something that was already checked to make sure the right parts are ordered. Necessary?  Maybe.  Efficient?  Nope.

The person closest to the machine with the manual in hand is the only one who should be making that call on a parts list.  That's the tech.

Making a corrective parts list doesn't create organizational learning. That just gets the machine running again.

The planner role is one of the most misused positions in the maintenance industry.

Used correctly, a good planner changes the future every day.

But the moment the techs decide they don't have to write their own parts lists anymore, you're better off without a planner.