Planners: The Underestimated Safety Heroes

One of the key roles in the maintenance world is the planner, they have the great task of defining and refining details to execute the required job, in order to keep assets up, finance on check, and most of all keep workers safe.

A pre-planned work order will have the advantage of reserving necessary materials and tools, and list any precautions that must be taken in order to complete the job in a safe manner. While avoiding delays and frustration with operations, and enabling fair scheduling, that allows all parties involved on the maintenance activity to coordinate and execute in the most efficient and effective way.

Often this role gets overlooked or even ignored, management believe that having a CMMS/EMS will do the work; but there is nothing farther from the truth. Planning goes beyond estimating the number of hours and standard resources to complete a job; it procures and assigns the safety procedures that convey to the specific situation. A good planner also looks at the history of the asset involved, getting insights on similar jobs from the past and can foresee any hazard. A missing element of any emergency-unplanned work.

It has been proven that planned work is safer and even less stressful than no planned work. Even though your CMMS/EMS can help to pre-populate any safety procedure based on asset classification or work order type, only a good planner can complement this information and consider more elements that will keep everybody safe.