Jeff Shiver, CMRP of People and Processes, Inc presents some pointers in selecting your next Maintenance Planner Scheduler. Since we are planning for Maintenance activities, ideally the Maintenance Planner Scheduler has craft skills. Watch to see more...

Transcript

I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. Often times in planning classes and other emails and blogs, I get asked the question, "What skills should I look for with a new planner?"

If I'm going to hire one, how would I approach it? If we look, one of the first things you want to consider is you want it to be one of your best craftspeople. When we say that, what we're looking for is the skills for the particular craft they're going to plan for. For example, I often see companies and they'll take an electrician and they might have some mechanical skills but they have difficulty planning, for example, pipe fitting. Or, you take a mechanical person and you ask them to plan for electrical and they struggle with that.

They need to have skills in the craft they're planning for. In addition, they need to be skilled in that craft. They need to understand the task steps and how they would approach the job. Remember, the goal of the planner scheduler is to drive wrench time or to increase craft efficiency.

Also, obviously they'd be working independently. Many times they'll be going out researching jobs on their own so they need to be a self starter, to be motivated.

In addition to that, they need good computer skills. Think about it. They'll be working with Word documents or something similar in creating the job plans. In addition to that, they'll need access to your CMMS, the Computerized Maintenance Management System, or EAM. If it's something more complicated like SAP as an example, they need to have a high level of skill regarding the software package itself.

How do you create the job plans? How do you schedule? How do you create the PM task as an example?

Then they're also your primary communication point for non emergency work, for planned work. They're interfacing with your Operations partners, maybe your Engineering partners around shutdowns and things like that so it's incredibly important they have good communication skills as well.

There's some other traits but these are the primary ones you need to focus on. Again, hope you enjoyed the tip. Have a great day. Jeff Shiver, People and Processes.