The Elusive Weekly Maintenance Schedule By John Reeve
Scheduling has several variations:
long range planning (LRP), shutdown/turnaround/outage scheduling,
rolling schedules, Weekly
Schedules and daily plans. All of these are important, but, the
Weekly Schedule process is by far the most significant yet underutilized
tool for work force efficiency. Most clients assume that their “scheduling
tool add-on” would make weekly scheduling easy. They soon
discover that what they bought is simply an interface tool to
a scheduling product. A further complication is that the interface
does not transfer all the needed information across at the right
level of detail. Upon discovering these problems too many users
say “this is too hard to use” and give up on one
of the most important benefits of a Computerized Maintenance
Management
System (CMMS) - increased labor productivity.
Where is the problem? It could be the software, or a lack of perceived benefit
for such a process, or a training issue. In most cases it is simply
a software
design issue – or lack of design. CMMS vendors have historically
relied on a third-party interface to facilitate the scheduling
function. They also seem to treat all scheduling requirements the
same. This generic approach has given the users a clumsy interface
which at best “sort of works”. The result is that very
few clients take the time to create a Weekly Schedule and even
fewer understand how important it can be to their success.
A resource-leveled Weekly Schedule adds even more value. This advanced
technique requires that several processes already be in place. For
example, if the backlog isn’t planned it will be very difficult
to create a schedule. Too many vendors and implementation consultants
gloss over this critical process and stumble when it comes to actual
implementation. Typical CMMS software and training regimen has a
work order screen for entering schedule dates, work priority fields,
plus an ability to print a report which lists work for the week,
but they lack both resource leveling and compliance analysis. In
other words, they ignore the process of deciding what is the most
critical work for the best use of limited resources.
Points to consider when determining if your company should develop
Weekly Schedules
1.
You should not have to hire more staff to generate
and operate a Weekly Schedule.
2.
You should not have to migrate this data outside of the CMMS
when the majority of the information needed for processing is already
in the CMMS.
3.
Resource leveling is an algorithm which can reside in the CMMS
product.
4.
There are little to no logic ties (work dependencies) requiring
critical path analysis.
Where is the greatest need?
For any given site, there are more man-hours (across a one year
time span) spent developing and maintaining Daily/Weekly schedules
than committed to Shutdown/Turnaround scheduling. The everyday
Planner/Scheduler not only represents the larger need but uses
the CMMS more than any other employee.
Weekly Scheduling – What is it and why is it
important?
A Weekly Schedule is an excellent management tool since every employee
can easily relate to “what needs to get done this week”.
More importantly, this design promotes proactive maintenance
which is more cost efficient than traditional reactive maintenance
practices. One week is also an ideal amount of time for forecasting
a set of work which all departments can support. Warehouse and
operations employees can be more easily convinced that the specific
jobs on the schedule will actually be completed. Management’s
goal should be to present a believable schedule that maximizes
the use of craft labor without incurring overtime - and that
effectively reduces backlog. Working with a schedule that accurately
forecasts work activities enhances worker productivity, builds
teamwork and keeps the staff focused on a common goal.
Resource Leveling
A resource-leveled Weekly Schedule provides a logical way to balance
required work versus available man-hours. Once a week, the resource
pool is assessed. This information is then compared to the backlog
of work. This may be a manual process or it may utilize a resource
leveling program. A preliminary schedule is then taken to the
Weekly Schedule meeting. The attendees then refine the schedule.
Without resource leveling, the process becomes subjective and
open to error – which unfortunately is common practice
for many sites.
Weekly Schedule Meeting
If the management team waits until the meeting to select the work,
then it is already too late to gain maximum value from the meeting.
The Weekly Schedule meeting is the time to refine the schedule – not
build it. That said, the Weekly Schedule meeting should be flexible.
This is the time to confirm whether the scheduled work is actually
the work which should be done. Work can be added or deducted
based on parameters not known to the CMMS. All affected departments
should be present to provide input and gain consensus. Good communication
between maintenance and operations will improve schedule accuracy.
An example of an appropriate change at the Weekly Schedule meeting
might be selecting related work based on the craft traveling
to a remote location. This “force selection” is called
opportunistic scheduling and is an acceptable practice. Resource
leveling would be performed a second time to incorporate these
changes, followed by re-issuance of the schedule. Since the resource
pool is fixed, some work may drop off.
When a user site initiates resource-leveled scheduling, it’s
typical that they will discover inaccuracies in the maintenance
backlog. This is because the automated selection of work depends
on accurate data.
Weekly Scheduling is a Process
Simply implementing a fundamental planning and scheduling system
should help improve productivity. Before each work day, the maintenance
supervisor will create his Daily Schedule – from the Weekly
Schedule. The work is linked to the worker in the Daily Schedule.
Each day, progress is provided on work performed and the CMMS
is updated. Examples of progress could be: work was started,
completed, or placed on hold.
Daily Schedule
The Daily Schedule should be created from the Weekly Schedule.
However, the typical Daily Schedule includes reactive maintenance
not shown on the Weekly Schedule. Please note: if the maintenance
organization is only issuing a Daily Schedule, this does not
eliminate the need for a Weekly Schedule. Relying only on daily
scheduling leads to increased reactive maintenance.
Schedule Compliance: the last step of the process
Once a schedule is issued, every attempt should be made to make
sure these activities occur. Sometimes unforeseen events prevent
the start of work. Some possible “reason codes” might
be:
1.
Operations would not let maintenance take the equipment
down
2.
Parts not available (even though the job was planned)
This information should be recorded in the database
under a compliance tracking table – recorded by the week
number and work order record. The goal is to make a schedule whichis >80% accurate each week.
Resource Pool
Every CMMS should provide easy entry screens for:
1.
Worker labor information including the labor identifier,
craft code and the assigned calendar/shift code.
2.
Yes/No worker availability. Is this craft person an available
worker? A worker, such as a Leading Hand may be in a craft but
not normally assigned to work activities. (A Leading Hand may be
the most senior person in the craft for larger maintenance organizations.)
3.
Yes/No craft availability. An entire craft code may be marked
as “no resource leveling necessary”.
4.
Calendar/shift definition – able to match any possible
rotating shift combination and company holiday schedule.
5.
Planned worker absences for next week. This data is stored as
non-available time per worker.
6.
Efficiency factor by craft – which relates
to the “percentage of time expected to be available to work
on the schedule each week”. This factor allows for an expected
amount of reactive maintenance and is critical in creating an accurate
resource pool.
Given the above tools, it is easy to maintain a resource
pool. The working level normally stays on the same shift, although
rotating, for years at a time. The only variable is when they say
something like “I have jury duty next Wednesday and Thursday”.
In the end, resource pool management is not an exact science. We
are just trying to get close. Typically you can find a staff member
in the maintenance group who already maintains this information.
The challenge is to get this data into the CMMS.
Resource Demand – the maintenance
backlog
The accuracy of the maintenance backlog is a critical part of the
process. If it is not accurate, then one might wonder how any
analytical decisions should be made from the CMMS – including
KPI measurements. The minimum amount of information needed within
the maintenance backlog for this process to work is:
1.
A valid work order record assigned to a supervisor
or an area with a clearly defined scope.
2.
The work order is in “ready” status, meaning it has
been planned and is ready to work with no material or operational
constraints, i.e. “requires major system shutdown”.
3.
Estimated man-hours by craft and the (minimum) number of men
required to perform this job are entered.
4.
Any long-lead material items required for this work are on-site,
and linked to this work order.
5.
The work order has a valid work type such as repair activity,
preventive maintenance, major maintenance or design work.
6.
The work order has an assigned priority; ideally a calculated
priority based on asset criticality.
There are many more steps to properly planning a
work order. But from a resource leveling view point, these form
the minimum criteria.
Resource Leveling – manual versus automatic
Resource leveling balances the resource demand (backlog) with the
resource pool (worker availability). This leveling can be done
with paper and pencil (as described by Doc Palmer). It can also
be done using software – meaning automatically. Either
approach involves a comparison of required work hours to available
hours. However, if done automatically, a substantial period of
time is saved. This factor is even more significant when the
schedule has to be regenerated during the course of a scheduling
meeting.
Subjective Selection Isn’t Effective
Without resource leveling, the staff is basically guessing how
many jobs can be completed each week. The maintenance supervisor
will routinely guess at a “safe” number they want
to work on, or they will select priority work which came up in
the last two days - because this is what they (and management)
remember as being important. This subjective selection technique
often leads to a less than desired backlog reduction rate since
there is no way the human mind can evaluate an entire backlog
of work taking into consideration multi-craft work orders, craft
estimates, work priorities and worker/craft availability.
Additional Concepts and Definitions
A.
A Weekly Schedule does not assign worker names to
work orders. That is done with the Daily Schedule. The Weekly Schedule
primarily states “this is the set of work which maintenance
needs to work on this coming week”.
B.
Weekly schedule compliance is a best practice – and
should also be a KPI (>80%)
There needs to be a separate table, other than the
work order table, in which to store these records by scheduled
week.
This table also allows for “reason codes” as to why
the work was not started.
C.
PM work
The CMMS product automatically generates these records as PM
work orders.
They have a work type of ‘PM’, a status of “ready” and
a target start date. If this target date falls within the upcoming
Weekly Schedule range then it will be scheduled.
Some sites may have a dedicated PM crew.
The processing order (“order of fire”) for the resource
leveling program involving PM work would be selected by the client.
D.
“Order of Fire”
This is a unique concept which defines the order of backlog processing.
A primitive answer would be to simply “take the highest priority”.
The “Order of Fire” concept directs the Planner/Scheduler
to develop statements which then control the exact order of evaluation.
Examples:
i.
EM or FIN work-types
ii.
“Carry-over work”
iii.
PM work with dates in range
iv.
Scheduled modifications which require internal maintenance resources
v.
All other maintenance work, ranked by calculated priority in
descending order and by report date
E.
Opportunistic Scheduling as a Best Practice
When reviewing a job on the Weekly Schedule it is
proper to also consider including related work, especially if the
work is at a remote location.
The Weekly Schedule meeting should allow
for this process to work quickly and efficiently. An effective
technique is for the planner/scheduler to project the computer-generated
report on a screen. While reviewing a work order record the planner
should then hyperlink to that work location (or asset field) and
bring up other related work. The attendees would then say, for
example, “select the first and third records and add them
to the schedule”. By working as a team the group can very
quickly make decisions which will be honored by everyone involved
in making them.
F.
Major maintenance; Modifications; Capital
work; Project work
Work can come from the Long Term Plan
(LTP). Typically an external group meets periodically to review
the entire LTP. They make decisions on budgets, priority, system
availability, shutdown requirements, contractor support and long-lead
material items.
Complications can also come from:
Jobs that cannot be done until a particular season
Long-lead time material requirements
Contractors may not be readily available.
Planned operational downtime
Multi-craft coordination
The major maintenance team might say, “the
following work is now ready for the Weekly Schedule”. This
should lead to the development of a work order in the CMMS product
with the proper work type (i.e. CP) and giving it a scheduled start
date. If this start date falls within the upcoming Weekly Schedule
range, it will be processed.
Major maintenance may or may not consume
on-site labor resources but it is still beneficial to include this
work in the Weekly Schedule. Adding this information gives improved
visibility to all departments, and reduces work coordination errors
such as tearing up the parking lot twice in the same month.
G.
In-progress work (sometimes called carry-over
work) deserves special consideration
Once a job is started it makes sense
to allow that work to be continued even if it crosses over onto
multiple weeks.
Any work left unfinished at end of the
week must be changed to “In
Progress” in the CMMS with these notations:
Remaining man-hours by craft
Is the status changed to “hold” or is
the unfinished work “available” for
the following week
H.
The importance of Planners – and
job planning
Creating a Weekly Schedule is quite
difficult without a planned backlog.
Maintenance work should be pre-planned
to the extent necessary to minimize delays in work performance.
Pre-planning also minimizes downtime, plus optimizes labor efficiency
and job safety.
Planners provide:
Consistency of input in regards to craft estimates,
priority assignment, work-type assignment, and proper asset identification.
Interpretation of each work request by using clear
and obvious wording and a sufficient amount of detail.
Links to work associated with future system shutdowns
A proactive view of future work not just short-term
reactive maintenance.
An important service by identifying recurring repair
problems and informing engineering.
I.
Shutdown/turnaround scheduling typically
requires a robust scheduling product since it involves the use
of logic ties, critical path and resource analysis. Conversely,
weekly scheduling is mostly a collection of work activities with
no inter-dependencies.
What if you have no Job Planners?
Not all CMMS sites are the same. Some user communities are in manufacturing,
heavy industry ad utilities have detailed job plans and work
packages. On the other hand, some facility maintenance organizations
may not have job planners to do this work. With or without a
Planner, it’s usually possible to find someone to create
a rough estimate and enter it into the CMMS. Here are the questions
to be asked and answered in this situation:
1.
What is the repair problem? Enter the problem description
and work type.
2.
What should be the priority of this work?
3.
What is the craft required to perform this work? Can this be
done with just one craft, or does it require two? Number of men?
Estimated man-hours?
4.
Are there any long-lead type material requirements? (Yes/No)
Typical facility maintenance takes only five to ten
minutes to enter the above information. Once entered, the status
can be changed to “ready”. This type of interaction
will help the maintenance department quickly develop an accurate
and useable “planned backlog”.
Depending on the situation It may take several “more than
forty-hour weeks” to catch up on backlog planning. The maintenance
staff should not be afraid of job planning. The worst situation
is to not have any planned estimates entered on the work order
and leave it up to the worker to define all requirements up front
- as well as do the work.
Communication between Operations and Maintenance
This subject often raises strong opinions and the CMMS vendors
have added to the confusion. Vendors simply say, “enter
a job priority for all new work and apply schedule dates”.
A better doctrine would make use of multiple fields: work priority,
asset priority, work type, schedule start dates, target start
dates and job status. As shown in the illustration below, by
making clever use of the work types, you can properly communicate
importance between departments. But for the routine backlog work,
the maintenance staff can internally prioritize the backlog.
They have the best familiarity with the overall contents. Note:
this backlog should be periodically reviewed and priorities re-assessed.
Maintenance needs and wants to support Operations, but they should
also support a Weekly Schedule format. Proper use of work types
promotes segregation of reactive maintenance for future analysis
and communicates importance. FIN work type will be placed on the
Daily Schedule regardless of what the Weekly Schedule dictates.
The Hidden Failure – Your Maintenance Backlog
Often the biggest gap is the belief, or lack of belief, that a
computer program can be good enough to create a Weekly Schedule.
The problem is usually the poor quality of the data - not the
quality of the software. If a site has confidence in their maintenance
backlog and is comfortable with the assigned priorities, then
they should know in advance what the leveling process will generate.
Therein the real problem is the accuracy of data - the “hidden
failure”. This reminds me of a client comment: “You
mean the (CMMS) backlog must be accurate?”
How can you learn if your system of Prioritization
is not working?
Here are some clues:
You are making use of “deadline” priorities.
This means you are linking the “allowed time to repair” to
a priority value. This approach does not take into account the
available resources for any given day or week. There will be violations
because you only have so many resources to get the work done.
You review your backlog of work and find “high priority” work
that is many months old.
You review your backlog of work and find that the majority of
all work has the same priority.
What would be a good system of Prioritization?
Backlog work priorities are periodically reviewed
and adjusted as needed.
The work order priority is combined with the asset/location priority.
This technique provides a normalized result and is ideal for ranking
the work.
The higher the number, the higher the priority. With this approach
there are no limits on processing new work - which is now more
important than the existing work in the backlog.
How much time should it take to develop a Weekly Schedule?
The answer depends on the amount of typing and screen manipulations
a person must perform to set-up the Weekly Schedule each week.
They may be creating a list of work and downloading this information
to other software programs for further editing and/or data sorting.
They may also be pushing the data to a P3 or Microsoft Project
(MSP) tool. Those who track the process of pushing this data
from and back to the scheduling tool usually find that a substantial
amount of effort is involved.
Typically the data moved outside the CMMS is quickly out of sync
with reality due to constant updates of the CMMS data from the insertion
of new work and changing priorities based on short-term emergencies.
What if work priorities or calendar data is entered on the schedule
side – and not updated on the CMMS? Is it necessary to maintain
work level calendars in two systems? What if the resource leveling
algorithm in the scheduling tool doesn’t use the “order
of fire” concept? Where do you run Weekly Schedule compliance?
How does your company compare to the general CMMS user community?
Based on my field experiences, talking with other consultants,
reading the industry magazines, and observing the various user
group internet sites there are very few sites generating a resource-leveled
Weekly Schedule.
CMMS Users Generating an Automated Resource Leveled Weekly Report
10,000
Estimated total CMMS client sites world-wide
x 35%
35% currently desire to have a Weekly Schedule
3,500
x 30%
But only 30% can say they currently have a planned backlog (>90%
planned) which is accurate
1,050
x 5%
Only 5% would willingly choose to perform automated resource
leveling – as opposed to subjective selection
53
Of the estimated 10,000 user sites only 53 sites potentially
generate an automated, resource leveled, Weekly Schedule
The reasons for this low adoption rate are simple. Software vendors
don’t believe there is a market for resource leveling software.
Likewise, because a useable tool has been unavailable users have
not learned the value of this process. My goal in this article
has been to break this “Catch 22” situation by giving
the readers of this article the information they need to understand
what they are missing.
So what now?
My clients have learned that with a readily-available CMMS “add
in” and adjustments in a few crucial processes they are
able to gain significant economic efficiencies. A surprising,
but significant, added bonus is that their companies soon become
a far better place to work. Shared goals built on inter-departmental
cooperation have quickly lowered conflict and increased job satisfaction.
If your company is one of the estimated fifty-three companies
world-wide who regularly generate a resource-leveled weekly report,
then be proud. If not, it’s probably time to evaluate how
you can join this elite group. Start by comparing your current
practices with those discussed in this article. If you believe
you have opportunities for improvement then take action. Change
what you can with your current skills and tools; then ask your
CMMS vendor and/or consultant to help you make it all the way.
About the author: John Reeve has spent the past eighteen years
helping clients solve real-world CMMS problems. As a Senior Consultant
for Synterprise Global Consulting he deals with “once in
a lifetime” issues several times each year. He can be reached
at JReeve@synterprise.com.
