Scheduling is like a conveyor belt

See, scheduling is a continuous process.?

It’s not something you do once and then forget about.?

The Conveyor Belt Analogy?

The best way to understand this is to imagine your scheduling process as a conveyor belt like this one:

As time progresses, the conveyor belt moves the buckets closer to you on the left.??Your scheduler’s job is to fill these weekly buckets with your maintenance work orders.?And that's what you see here.

The buckets are partially filled, overfilled, or perfectly filled with work orders. Now, here’s a few things you need to keep in mind using this model:?

1. You only want to see green blocks (ready-to-execute work) in your current frozen week. And the bucket should be perfectly filled to the top, which means you are utilising all your available labour capacity.?
2. There will be less greens and more blues (fully planned work) in the next weeks. That means less and less work is ready to execute, and more and more work is fully planned but still waiting on parts.??
3. Most of the work is white (plannable work) as you go out further. Which means the planner still needs to plan most of the work farther away from the frozen week. Only by exception should you allow white blocks to sit in week three and week four. Only by exception.?

Draft Weeks?

After your frozen week (current week), the next three weeks should be filled mostly with green blocks and a few blue blocks.??

These are your draft weeks (see yellow line below).?

And we've kept a few blue blocks for week three and four because they could be high-priority work, best done with work orders already scheduled in those weeks.??

?And that's fine.?

Swapping?

So, before the frozen weekly schedule is issued next week, the planner needs to confirm that the work orders are indeed ready to execute.?

Otherwise, the scheduler needs to defer that job from week two to week three or four, and bring forward a green block from a future week.?

Overloaded weeks?

In some weeks, you might have reduced capacity and have loaded too much work, like for week 4 in this example. But in this case, the scheduler has decided not to change that just yet until they know exactly what work will be ready to execute.??

At this point, it's fine to have a week that is three weeks away to be overloaded to some degree. That’s reality.??

And I don't want to show you a perfect picture because these things are going to happen in your plant.??

It's up to your scheduler to deal with these capacity issues on a weekly basis.?

Now, this was an overview of what the scheduling process is like.?

Of course, there’s a lot more to it.??

But if I discuss all that here, this email would be way too long.?

So, if you want to learn more about the scheduling process and the conveyor belt analogy in greater detail, you can check out our online training course, PS100: Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling .?

Or if you prefer, send me a message here if you want to create a custom training program that fits the needs of your team.?

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways we can help you on your Road to Reliability:

1. Want to train your team on how to improve your plant's maintenance reliability?

Enroll your team in one of our most popular online training courses:

Implementing Maintenance Planning and Scheduling —increase your maintenance workforce by 35% without hiring anyone. Reduce costs, improve safety and increase morale.

Developing and Improving Preventive Maintenance Programs —achieve higher reliability and availability whilst doing less maintenance. Acquire the knowledge and tools needed to create a highly effective and efficient Preventive Maintenance Program.

2. Want to know how effective your Planning & Scheduling really is?

Use our Planning & Scheduling Scorecard ?to assess your performance and receive a personalised PDF report with recommendations on how to improve.

Use our Wrench Time Calculator ?to easily calculate how much value your organisation is missing out when you neglect your Planning & Scheduling.

3. Want to start your journey on the road to reliability?

Download the Reliability Academy eBook? and discover a simple, proven framework that you can use to achieve a highly reliable plant for your organisation. Unlike other overly complicated models that use 10 to 20 elements, the Road to Reliability framework only uses 4 elements to achieve great results.