Maintenance & Reliability
Outage!—The Planning & Scheduling Experience
Your organization is asking your maintenance departments to keep machinery running
longer with fewer people, solve problems and reduce failures, improve
reliability, implement new programs, execute professional shutdowns and outages,
and do so at reduced cost. This can only be accomplished if the maintenance organization
is efficient, effective, and good at coordinating with production.
Professional application of planning and scheduling concepts is a critical maintenance
business practice for achieving and maintaining a “world class” status
for any maintenance organization. And GP can help with a unique planning and scheduling
exercise called Outage!.
See how Outage! makes a profound performance impact.
With effective planning and scheduling, 30 maintenance technicians could yield the
effect of 47. Thousands of staff-hours can be harvested from non-value added activities
so people have more time for training, cross-training, participation in reliability
improvement, safety programs, spare parts management, etc.
Planners provide significant benefits to a maintenance organization (backlog reduction,
run-time improvements, material / parts availability, safety), but they cannot do
it on their own. People throughout the organization—production, maintenance
workers, contractors, supervisors, spare parts—impact the planning and scheduling
function. Outage! can provide the skills and understanding your maintenance team
needs to:
- Launch a fresh round of planning and scheduling improvements
- Reinvigorate your planning and scheduling processes
- Reinforce the concepts learned in their planning and scheduling training
Give us one day and we’ll give you lasting results.
Outage! is an exciting, interactive 8-hour simulation that replicates a real maintenance
outage with the typical problems of parts, manpower constraints, QC problems, contractor
issues, scheduling dilemmas, work orders, safety issues, work identified late, risk
assessment, and more. While it’s fun, it’s also powerfully meaningful
in the way it reinforces planning and scheduling concepts and best practices.
Outage! is designed for all personnel responsible for planning, preparing, managing,
and executing outages or extended maintenance repairs:
- Planners
- Supervisors
- Managers
- Leaders
- Production and maintenance personnel
- Procurement and storeroom
Your takeaways from the experience include:
- Best practices in planning & scheduling and outage preparation
- Direct experience in a hands-on and highly interactive simulation
- Ideas to help you build your own case for change
- A clear view of the benefits of a fresh round of improvements
- Enthusiasm that builds momentum
- Sophisticated learning principles to drive behavioral changes back to the plant
- Identification of measurable gaps and opportunities back at your organization
- First hand understanding of the benefits of planning and scheduling
- A fun experience that you can relate to your coworkers and put training into practice
Dive into the Outage! experience.
Outage! is typically played by three teams of six to eight players. The element
of competition works wonders in sharpening skills and discovering performance gaps.
Each team is given an identical set-up, including parts, work orders, personnel
requirements, schedule conflicts, etc. Teams then assess the backlog and the outage
list and begin the process of identifying constraints, risks, preparation requirements.
Based on work order information and constraints such as personnel, contractors,
the crane itself, parts, coordination issues, etc., the teams begin working on the
schedule. They sketch out a rough Gantt chart and begin to find ways to use cycle
time compression, lean maintenance, and parallel paths. Before long they are discovering
their critical path and using critical path management techniques.
Teams will also need to kit, stage, and conduct quality checks on parts, materials,
and tools. They hold a pre-shutdown meeting to ensure they are ready-to-go and then
all teams start the execution of the outage at the same time.
The winning team is the one that gets the most work done safely in the shortest
period of time, with the least amount of maintenance wastes and losses. In the end,
they’ve not only gained hands-on experience in a time-sensitive situation,
but they’ve also sharpened their skills and learned from the successes and
failures of the other teams.
Download our
Outage! brochure (401KB PDF) or contact us today to learn more about GP’s unique Outage! simulations: