The Manufacturing SABIC Europe Geleen site includes naphtha crackers, downstream petrochemical plants, like polyethylene and polypropylene, and facilities for the distribution and storage of raw materials and products. The site organization consists out of departments operating on plant and site level. Together we make SABIC Europe's production site in Geleen definitely world-class.

The department Maintenance is part of the organization Site Services on the site Geleen. Maintenance is a centrally organized department which has the goal to maintain the 7 plants on the site.
It consists of the departments Maintenance Planning & Scheduling and Maintenance Execution. In total about 150 people are working in the maintenance organization.

In order to ensure that maintenance is executed safely, effectively and (cost) efficient, all the maintenance tasks executed by the maintenance organization are planned & scheduled by the department Maintenance Planning & Scheduling. Planning means preparation of maintenance tasks by defining a scope, ordering materials & services and making a resource planning of the task. In the planning process, the maintenance field planner is in contact with the different assignment owners, procurement and contractors. Scheduling means the scheduling of the prepared maintenance tasks and assigning resources to realize efficient execution according to schedule. A well planned job results in a very efficient execution.

The planning process is a time consuming process and is being considered as indirect costs. The planning process for a maintenance task is often done in-house as well as with a contractor who executes the maintenance task. We wonder how efficient we execute the planning process and whether we can optimise in the chain.

In the first part you are challenged to define a method to measure the indirect cost (as percentage of direct costs) for maintenance tasks, both for assignments executed by the SABIC maintenance department and the assignments executed by our contractors. In this way we will be able to benchmark our own performance against contractor performance and other external maintenance organizations. Although this should not be to difficult, it turned out to be rather complex. It cannot be solved without thorough understanding of the process and detailed analysis of the available data.

In the second part you are challenged to use the information to explain differences and to come up with optimization steps in the planning process. We strive for chain optimisation, both within the SABIC Maintenance organisation as in close cooperation with contractors. The project should also generate information for the number of people needed for the planning process.

The assignment provides you a challenging environment in which you will be able to get to know a world-class maintenance organization and maintenance management. You will interact with people from the maintenance organization, procurement and contractors and you will get to know software applications like SAP & MS projects.