If someone told you that you could do more with less people, you would think they were a fool, right? Well, actually, that person is correct and some basic planning and scheduling strategies is proof of it. Those strategies can ultimately gain time by processing work in a more strategic and efficient manner. Controlling your backlog in maintenance and reliability is hard if you don’t, as the saying goes, “plan your work and work your plan.”
plan your work and work your plan
A good way of looking at planning and scheduling would be:
- I am a provider of a service and I need to understand the scope of the service I am to provide.
- A client/stakeholder is requesting this service to be completed timely and efficiently.
- For me to complete this scope, I must do a little planning and know when I can do the work.
- I can then provide the client/stakeholder with a service level agreement (SLA) to accomplish the tasks desired.
With an SLA in place, you can now process your work by planning and scheduling it with your available resources. If the agreed upon SLA requires quicker service, there may be a need to hire more people. This is where the magic of planning and scheduling can align your strategies to provide you with resources without hiring, in some cases.
How you ask? Here is the plan.
Maintenance is usually aligned from week to week. Based on the availability of your resources, you can align that work functionally and more efficiently. Via scheduling meetings, review your work weekly. You are more likely to find time by aligning that work and correcting defects that are causing your downtime. Processing this work with planning and scheduling in mind then gives you backup to support your SLAs and manage your backlog. If your client/stakeholder is upsetting the apple cart with extra requests or rerouting personnel, your planned approach will show where this occurs so you can correct the behavior.
Let’s take three mechanics as an example. Those three mechanics are completing things like planning, gathering material, scheduling, talking to the stakeholders, coordinating with supervisors, and completing the work by themselves. Their productivity level is approximately 35 percent. Together with three technicians, the total productivity would be 105 percent. This total is basically a five percent improvement of one person being fully scheduled and completing work.
Figure 1: 3 technicians at 35% productivity
Now, what if one of those technicians were put in the role of planner. Their sole responsibility is to accomplish ALL the planning/scheduling efforts for the other two mechanics, thus leaving the technician, your subject matter expert (SME), completing the work and not having to complete many of the administrative needs.
Figure 2: 2 technicians at 55% productivity + 1 planner
Since the planner is aligning work, sometimes they are tasked with scheduling also, so they can apply the technician to 100 percent of their availability and see an increase of 20 percent productivity. Doing the math, you get two technicians now at 55 percent productivity, which works out to be 110 percent total productivity. So, you have increased productivity by five percent by only having two technicians complete a fully planned and scheduled approach. Taking this a step further:
55% productivity (planned) / 35% productivity (unplanned) = 1.57 improvement factor
30 technicians * 1.57 improvement factor = 47 technicians worth of work
Translating this effort to backlog and supporting the earlier statement of reducing it, you should look at the work week and how you can leverage the time you have saved to mitigate the backlog. Scheduling meetings are key in this strategy to outline your work for weeks ahead of time. This meeting will look at last week, this week and next week, at a minimum. Reviewing the work accomplished from last week and comparing it to what was left over will allow you visibility into future work weeks to align where you have resource availability. Moving items that were incomplete to those available spaces in your schedule will allow you to control the backlog from getting out of hand via forecasting and potentials for overtime. Coupling this with the aforementioned scenario with a planned and scheduled approach will garner that time to support completing these tasks.
Figure 3: Your work week effects on backlog
Figure 4: Schedule achievement breakdown
Reactive work will occur no matter what you try and accomplish; it is just the nature of the beast in maintenance and reliability. Remember, THIS IS OK! Having an urgent crew can alleviate heartburn on this subject because you can task those people with triaging the immediate calls, thus allowing your planned and scheduled work to commence as you have designed. This speedy response will allow you to move more pressing backlog into your strategy for maximum mitigation in a planned and scheduled approach. Your personal power and skill set are your best defense in accomplishing such a feat. Use them to your advantage and set yourself up for success.
Reviewing your work through analytics is the best way to identify if you are accomplishing your goals.
Reviewing your work through analytics is the best way to identify if you are accomplishing your goals. Having specific metrics toward schedule achievement versus break-in work will allow you to find where your program is missing attention. Determine viable key performance indicators (KPIs) to support the program’s success and visibility to your executive sponsor so you can rest assured your program can thrive. With this process, your reliability engineers or, in most cases, your workforce, can review those items and create defect elimination processes to aid in diminishing the reactive natured work that causes your backlog to increase. This way, you have a fighting chance to reduce it by fighting fire with fire.
Determine viable key performance indicators (KPIs) to support the program’s success and visibility to your executive sponsor so you can rest assured your program can thrive.
Resources
- https://reliabilityweb.com/search/?q=planning+and+....
- Palmer, Richard (Doc). Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook, 4th edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2019.
- Woolley, Darren. “Why service level agreements (SLAs) are not relevant to marketing service contracts.” Trinity P3, March 14, 2023, https://www.trinityp3.com/agency-contracts/irrelev....
- Hupje, Erik. “Without planning and scheduling, you will fail.” Road to Reliability. Reliability Academy, 2021, https://roadtoreliability.com/fail-without-planning-scheduling/.
