Finding your true capacity

by R.T. “Chris” Christensen

Editor’s note: To better serve your information needs, Coach Christensen’s column now focuses on important maintenance issues. No problem for Chris. Prior to his teaching work, he spent more than a dozen years as a maintenance manager at large U.S. manufacturing plants. — P.A.

Every time I look at problems that someone is having scheduling their maintenance operation, I find that there is a root cause to the scheduling problem.

The symptoms I see are large stacks of work orders. I see work orders that are old and past due. The majority of completed work is for emergency work orders and rush items and, at times, these too are late. Another problem with completed emergency work orders is that, in some cases, these repairs were only a temporary patch to get things running again. That is followed by the permanent fix order that languishes in the large pile of work orders to be scheduled.

The term that comes to mind from the maintenance manager is that all they do is fight fires. And it’s a downhill spiral because nothing gets done. It’s one emergency after another. And all of the temporary work completed after that will need to be re-repaired if they can get to it before it breaks again.

In talking to the managers of maintenance departments that are in this downhill spiral, they ask how to get out of the mess. They say they schedule the maintenance repairs but they are never able to meet the schedule. And, today’s schedule becomes tomorrow’s problem.

Then I ask what the maintenance department’s available capacity is. Most of the time, these managers don’t know. And, why does it make any difference anyway? What does available capacity mean to a maintenance operation? The piece that is missing is a full definition of the available capacity by craft in the maintenance department. The manager looks and says, “Why do I need to know this?” The answer is really simple.

There is no way that you can schedule your maintenance shop if you don’t know how much craft capacity you have available to schedule. It’s like writing checks from your checkbook without knowing your on-hand balance. So in this case, the checkbook balance is the available capacity and your scheduling is the writing of the checks that can utilize that capacity.

If you write checks to an unknown capacity, you will be faced with a bank overdraft statement. In the case of the maintenance department, you won’t have a shortage in your bank book, but you will have work orders that weren’t completed that will become tomorrow’s panic work order.

Where do you start to dig your way out of this mess? And even if you have a good scheduling system, you just might want to take another look at what you are doing.

In order to schedule, the first thing you must do is see how much capacity is available. You need to take a look at each craft and determine how many total hours are available for each shift and for each craft. We aren’t addressing anything about capability, speed, work time, etc. Those are different topics that need to be treated separately. Just look at your available capacity by craft because that is how you schedule, hours by craft.

To determine available hours, you must determine how many hours are available per craftsperson per shift. If it’s an eight-hour shift, you don’t have eight hours available. Most of you have a 10-minute break in the morning and the afternoon plus a five-minute washup for lunch and again at the end of the shift. That consumes a half-hour per day and leaves only 71/₂ hours available per shift. Now take that number and multiply it by the number of craftspeople per shift and the number of shifts per week to give you a base available capacity plan per craft per week. You will need to modify this based on the time your particular crews get for breaks, washup and length of shift, but this gives you a basic capacity time available for you to begin scheduling.

When you know the capacity time available, then and only then can you begin to schedule your work.

In the following months, I will go deeper into craft capacity and scheduling techniques to give you some ideas on what effective maintenance staffs do. If you have any comments or would like to get some ideas for your particular capacity scheduling issues, just e-mail me at the address inside the blue box above and I will answer. If it’s a good question or idea, you just might find yourself in future issues of this MRO Coach column.

Back to top                                 Back to MRO Coach archives