Scheduling and Maintenance: The Synergy Between APS and TPM
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In theory, maintenance management and production scheduling seem to be very close and interconnected processes, after all they manage many resources in common and have the same objectives of increasing their availability and efficiency. However, the integration between them is little explored in current practice in Brazilian industry. And I understand: both areas have very lean personnel resources and low future visibility, with a lot of uncertainty, which means that, unfortunately, management needs to be as simple as possible, focusing on what is most critical, urgent and known.THE LIMITATION BY LOW VISIBILITY Those who work with TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) already have a more solid basis for joint action with PPCP because its pillars include planned maintenance, whether preventive or predictive. However, this planning is usually carried out within the Maintenance area and the information hardly ever reaches PPCP in a formal way. The information comes in a phone call, a meeting or a conversation in the corridor, when the areas interact and maintenance says "Look, PPCP, machine X is going to have a 4-hour maintenance session this coming Thursday at 2pm." This situation is aggravated for those who don't use APS software, because even if the maintenance plan has a horizon longer than a week, PPCP itself has no way of seeing more than a few days in its own production schedule with precision. So maintenance that is further ahead has no clear use. In short, this scenario of low visibility and scheduling accuracy limits the synergy between the areas. On the other hand, when we have production scheduling through APS, we can improve these processes.APS + TPM FOR PLANNINGWhenyou start using the Opcenter APSa very interesting way of seeing finite production capacity is to bring planned maintenance into the Gantt chart, so that it is already taken into account when scheduling, as in the image below. This way, an operation can't be scheduled at that moment on a resource that will already be committed to maintenance.
Figure 1 - Pre-programming Gantt with predictive maintenance in green and preventive maintenance in orange
This maintenance can be recorded directly by the Opcenter APS key user, but ideally it can be imported from another system, be it the maintenance module of your ERP, MES or a specialist maintenance system. A next step in synergy can arise when maintenance doesn't have to take place exactly on that specific day and time, but rather over a certain ideal period. In this way, the exact allocation of maintenance can be carried out after PPCP has analyzed the production schedule itself. For example, predictive maintenance software can inform the APS when the maintenance will take place and set it on the horizon as shown in Figure 1, but it could also create a maintenance request to be allocated to a specific period, which would have its exact day and time allocated by the PPCP in the APS, respecting the limits indicated by the maintenance and seeing what is the best time for this maintenance to take place, damaging production as little as possible.Because the APS takes into account the synchronism between operations and the shifts of each resource, it is possible to see situations in which maintenance allocated to the morning or afternoon shift alters production efficiency. In fact, this impact on efficiency can occur not only for the resource that will undergo maintenance, but also for subsequent operations that depend on the production of that resource. In other words, the link between what maintenance needs and what PPCP needs through integrated scheduling boosts efficiency gains. Of course, making this change isn't simple; you need to have a well-structured process, with people responsible and deadlines for these new activities, and you also need to add more layers of integration between the systems, because APS will return the scheduled maintenance dates as well. Even so, the gains in efficiency and better visibility favor the initiative.
Potential gaps for maintenance fitting
Figure 2 - Post-programming Gantt with potential gaps for maintenance allocation
But what about corrective maintenance?Corrective maintenance is perhaps the most critical area to include in an integration between APS and EPR or MES, given the urgency of the response that PPCP needs to have when something unexpected like a machine breakdown occurs and the impact that the problem can have. However, precisely because of the urgency and the lack of resources to standardize processes, many industries solve these problems outside the system. Firstly, this is a problem for maintenance itself, as there is no record of downtime and it harms indicators such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and MTTR (Mean Time to Repair). Secondly, if this is not entered into the system, the APS will depend on manual intervention by the scheduler to enter the corrective maintenance and reschedule production based on this. A good integration between the ERP or MES and the APS means that, when a corrective maintenance event occurs, the APS can already block the resource during the time foreseen for diagnosis, the MTTD (Mean Time To Detect), as well as updating the maintenance duration according to the MTTR foreseen for that type of problem, once it has been diagnosed.
Figure 3 - Gantt with scheduling and corrective maintenance in red with time automatically imported by MTTR
It is important to understand that very short stoppages are unlikely to have an impact on production scheduling (or rescheduling), as they are very short-term events and not significant enough (the impact of these problems can be measured by schedule adherence). However, longer stoppages or stoppages on extremely critical resources may require an immediate on-demand response and this agile integration can become a major differentiator.
And how can NEO help your industry?
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