MRO Today - The keys to good planning

The keys to good planning

by R.T. “Chris” Christensen

It comes up time and again. How can you possibly schedule a maintenance department with all the emergencies and special work orders that we’re always called on to do? Maintenance is chaos, and there is no way to plan out of it, right? You can if you begin to understand several key points.

In scheduling, all you really do is allocate time. It’s time management. Time is the only commodity that goes away by itself. The clock keeps ticking, whether you use it or not. Waste an afternoon and tomorrow the tasks that didn’t get done still await you. The machine is still broken. The supervisors are still waiting for you to fix the machine. You still have the parts (you read my past columns, right?). Everything is still here, right where you left it, except one thing. The time to do the work is gone and there are new pressing problems. The work keeps piling up. How do you get out of this situation?

Remember, scheduling is simply an allocation of time. You must start allocating time to schedule the operation. This is called planning, and a couple of basics are required.

The first thing you need to do is determine how much time is available each day by craft and then multiply that times the number of days you plan to work in a week. No, there isn’t eight hours available in a day. At best, there’s only seven hours available per day when you subtract two 10-minute breaks, a half-hour lunch and two five-minute wash periods. Your department’s time might be different than this, so use your figure when calculating this.

Next, determine how much time it’s going to take to get each task done. This will include time allocation for things like travel, inspection, research, parts location, tools acquisition, coffee breaks, talking to Jim about last night’s game, whatever. Now, it’s a simple task to load the days up with the time estimates based on the hours available. This sets a basic schedule.

Simple, right? But, consider this. To assist in scheduling the shop, you might want to break your work orders down into four types:
1) Priority work orders
2) Non-critical work orders
3) Preventive maintenance
4) Emergency work orders

What you begin to do is to look at the amounts of time that you spend each day doing work that falls into these areas. You then will begin to see a pattern in how much of your day is spent working on PMs, emergencies, and critical and non-critical work orders.

You can now build the schedule. Start with the easy one first, then the critical jobs and then finally schedule the fillers.

First, sequence the required time each day for PMs and allocate the work needed to be done into the time available. If you find that 20 percent of your daily time is spent on preventive maintenance, then sequence PM work orders that take up 20 percent of the day. Next, lay the priority work orders into the schedule. These are usually big jobs that you need to get done, so here is where you allocate time to complete them. See if there is enough time to get the jobs done by the date they are due. But in this category, start with the bottleneck machines first.

Here comes the tricky part. After doing all this, you begin to understand how much of the time is spent each day and what needs to be done to meet the due dates. The next jobs to schedule are emergency orders. You don’t know what they are, but you have an understanding of the time spent each day on such orders. So, allocate some time in your schedule based on past averages to work on emergencies. We call these unplanned orders, but what you are doing is setting time aside for them and, in effect, planning for the unplanned.

This leaves the non-critical work orders. They get scheduled last and fit into the time available. Schedule them last as this is where you get added time if you have a more or less than average amount of emergency work to do. If things run to schedule, you complete the PMs and planned work orders, schedule the emergency time and finish the non-critical jobs, too. If there is time left, you can pull forward additional hours of non-critical work. But if disaster strikes, you can reschedule the non-criticals to get more time for the emergency. Because these are non-critical work orders, a week or two early or late won’t make much difference.

This is a great way to schedule the operation. Do this and you’ll find that things start getting done. When that happens, the amount of emergency work will, in fact, go down. Planning sequence is the key to successful scheduling.

R.T. "Chris" Christensen is the director of the University of Wisconsin School of Business' operations management program. If you have a question, contact Coach Christensen by phone at 608-441-7326 or e-mail cchristensen@execed.bus.wisc.edu.