Coming soon · Book Profile
Maintenance Planning Scheduling
A practitioner's comprehensive guide showing how properly implemented maintenance planning and scheduling can nearly double maintenance workforce productivity by reducing delays and freeing up technician time.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
The Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook fills a critical gap between the widely acknowledged strategic importance of maintenance planning and the practical details of making it actually work. Written by Doc Palmer, an actual maintenance practitioner who transformed his own organization's planning program, this book reveals why most planning efforts fail and sets forth twelve concrete principles (six for planning, six for scheduling) that resolve the subtle 'crossroads' decisions determining success. The core promise is dramatic: a group of 30 technicians aided by a single planner can accomplish the work of 47, because planning boosts 'wrench time' (actual productive time on the job) from a typical 25-35% to 50-55%. Rather than treating planning as merely gathering parts and tools or using a computer system, the book positions planning as a coordinating function that leverages the entire maintenance organization. With step-by-step procedures, real work-order examples, wrench-time studies, aids-and-barriers analyses, and honest treatment of the human and organizational realities, this handbook equips maintenance managers, planners, and supervisors to install or fix a planning function and achieve superior plant reliability.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A maintenance manager, planner, or supervisor who wants a reliable plant with high production capacity and a productive, respected maintenance workforce.
- The problem
- Maintenance crews spend only 25-35% of their time productively working; delays, reactive firefighting, and low completion rates plague the organization. They feel frustrated that planning 'doesn't seem to work,' unsure why productivity stays low despite hard work and even expensive computer systems.
- The plan
- Understand the vision: planning increases productivity by reducing delays and enabling scheduling.
- Adopt the six planning principles and six scheduling principles.
- Handle reactive vs. proactive and minimum vs. extensive work appropriately.
- Select and train the right planners and organize them as a separate group.
- Build component-level files and a solid work order system as the foundation.
- The payoff
- Wrench time rises to 50-55%, effectively adding free labor capacity. · Backlogs clear, more proactive work is done, and plant availability/reliability improves. · Crews receive planned jobs with head starts; supervisors gain scheduling control; managers can allocate work confidently.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
Additional reading
- Mathematical Aspects of Reliability-Centered Maintenance · Howard L. Resnikoff
Mentioned in the preface as a companion volume that provides a formal mathematical treatment of the subjects covered in the main text.
- Handbook: Maintenance Evaluation and Program Development (MSG-1) · 747 Maintenance Steering Group, Air Transport Association
The direct predecessor document to RCM, used to develop the initial maintenance program for the Boeing 747. It is cited as the first application of decision-diagram techniques.
- Airline/Manufacturer Maintenance Program Planning Document: MSG-2 · Air Transport Association, R & M Subcommittee
An improved version of MSG-1 that was used to develop maintenance programs for the DC-10 and L-1011. The book states that RCM is a more rigorous and expanded version of the MSG-2 logic.
- Reliability and Long Life Design · Robert P. Haviland
Cited in a footnote as an 'excellent detailed discussion of the physical processes present in the failure mechanism,' providing deeper background on the nature of failure.
- Operations Management · Richard Schonberger
Cited by the author to support the definition of core competencies, specifically mentioning that expert maintenance can be a way an organization distinguishes itself positively.
- The Benchmarking Workbook · Gregory Hines
Cited by the author for its definition of a core competency, which includes managing and supporting facilities and capital equipment, directly validating maintenance as a core process.
- The Benchmarking Management Guide · American Productivity and Quality Center
Cited by the author to identify business measures that core competencies should impact, such as Return on Net Assets and Asset Utilization, which are central to the book's thesis on maintenance.
- RCM II · John Moubray
The book recommends this text for a detailed, in-depth approach to Reliability Centered Maintenance, a key technique discussed in Chapter 10.
- The Balanced Scorecard · Robert Kaplan and David Norton
The book dedicates a chapter to explaining the Balanced Scorecard framework and how the book's maintenance strategies and indicators align with it.
- Introduction to TPM: Total Productive Maintenance · Seiichi Nakajima
This is a foundational text for the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concept, which the author positions as a key phase in the 'Maintenance Era' that the book seeks to move beyond.