Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Workshop

The Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) is a team of improvement specialists that are dedicated to providing manufacturers in Illinois with the tools and techniques to excel and compete globally.

IMEC contracted Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, LLC to help one of IMEC’s clients, Sensient Technologies, increase their production capacity, which was being hampered by extensive equipment downtime. Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, LLC provided a three-day workshop focused on preventative and corrective maintenance (with the goal of restoring plant assets to proper operating conditions) and the creation of an implementation plan for Sensient Technologies to begin their improvement efforts.

The intent of the workshop was to teach Sensient Technologies’ employees how to create work instructions for preventative maintenance activities and corrective maintenance repairs and how to schedule them to maximize utilization of available scheduled downtime. Additionally, the workshop taught the participants how to create tasks that would ensure that repairs and inspections would address known performance deficiencies and permanently correct them, improving the mean time between failures for the production lines.

Workshop participants were shown how to schedule packages of work that made the best use of available time. They were taught how to create kits containing all necessary instructions, materials, and tools to ensure that available repair time was utilized efficiently and that non-value-added activities and rework were minimized.

During the workshop, the team was tasked to create and execute multiple planned work activities and to develop a standard process to continue at the workshop’s conclusion.

Following the workshop, Sensient Technologies implemented a full-time maintenance position of Maintenance Planner/Scheduler and began implementing the new standard processes.