Systematic and Effective Maintenance Capacity Planning

Maintenance capacity planning (MCP) is one of the main planning activities in any maintenance system. The purpose of the MCP is to determine the resources required and needed to meet the maintenance workload. One of the main resources is the workforce needed to attend the maintenance workload and tasks. Therefore, the proper workforce sizing plays a significant role in achieving the main goal and objective from the maintenance tasks in order to keep the plant up, safe to operate and well configured for the intended tasks. In practice, the determination of the required workforce is different from process industry plant to another and, it is significantly affecting the overall maintenance performance. Moreover, the plant safety, availability and reliability can be affected as well. To study the different industrial practices and methods of maintenance workforce determination, the authors have conducted a survey that cover the major industrial sectors in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to identify the current industrial practices with regards to manpower MCP. The survey focused mainly on the approaches used for estimating the maintenance load, estimating the workforce requirements, and the maintenance workforce sizing adequacy assessment. The results of the survey indicated that there is a clear need to focus on sharing the best practices of Manpower MCP. In addition, the results indicate that there is no unified approach for the maintenance workforce determination; this highlight the need to develop more robust techniques for developing Manpower MCP. Moreover; the authors summarize the best practices and proposes guidelines for effective MCP.