Generate Weekly Schedule inside CMMS
Most sites have fewer planners than they need. And most sites have very large backlogs (of which you can't simply wave a wand and make it go away). And, these backlogs are mostly unplanned. So, what do we do?
The scheduling solution would need to know the craft availability for the coming week. These hours would be by craft and also include any planned absence information.
Here is a picture showing my preferred process. All work orders must have a "rough estimate" applied based on Lead Craft. This prerequisite means that resource leveling will work.
The purpose of making a weekly schedule is as follows:
- Create an agreed-to list of work for an advance period of time. It seems one week out provides the needed forecast time, but not so far out that accuracy is reduced. The goal is an accurate schedule, so that the work force knows this to be absolute truth, and that they should do everything possible to complete these tasks.
- By creating an agreed-to list of work, you are enhancing departmental and work force coordination; job safety; and optimizing backlog reduction. Operations can evaluate permit requests in advance. Warehouse can stage (and even deliver) materials. And, Safety (HSE) can show up for high-risk jobs having plenty of notice.
- Schedulers can bundle like work together (even though different work orders) to benefit from one clearance or LOTO.
- By using the various fields on the work order (such as priority), management is happy that critical work is being performed.
- The weekly schedule creates a "set of work" (for the week) from which Daily Plans can be created. This set of work should not be altered.
- By freezing this "set of work", work order compliance can be obtained on the following Monday.
Schedule Generation: You have Choices
This is an advanced process of which there are many prerequisites. From the Doc Palmer book, you will find an illustration showing CREW WORK HOURS AVAILABILITY FORECAST. This form is intended for the Planner/Scheduler to fill out manually each week on Thursday deducting each job for the weekly schedule from crew availability. Well . . . this would be a time consuming process.. An automatic leveling capability is needed to create a "set of work" for the week.
In Summary
There are thousands of sites around the world using asset management systems. Unfortunately, 80-90% have never successfully created an automatic resource-leveled weekly schedule.
Turnaround Engineer at Dow
9 å¹´Interesting post! I think they key here really is the "Daily review" meeting. This will give everyone in the maintenance department the opportunity to discuss the work that has been planned for the day before but wasn't executed. Scheduling software can help you prioritize, but it's still people who need to execute the work.
Book author, CRL, CMM and CMMS champion.
9 å¹´concern is valid but...easily addressed. The creator of the schedule sets Availability Factor at some percentage . ..eg 70% But note, there are some Administrators who go off the rails on this and insist on scheduling 100%. Either way it is not a software issue/challenge.
CEO and Senior Consultant at Reliability Dude, LLC
9 å¹´There are certainly situations in which "break-in work" can disrupt a detailed, planned schedule. The benefit is that now you still have the planned jobs planned and can "push" them as required to the next slot. This is an exercise in creating order out of chaos and giving up because it's not perfect is the wrong thing to do. The longer you iterate this process, the fewer break-ins you will see, and simply because of the fact that reactive maintenance costs 3 to 4 times what planned maintenance costs, it pays to stick to your guns. I did a calculation at a solar manufacturing facility I worked at, and our reactive costs were 2.75 times our planned costs...and that was in a brand-new greenfield built plant. Imagine the gains in a 30+ year old plant like I am managing now......
Book author, CRL, CMM and CMMS champion.
9 å¹´thanks Carlos. I did respond to Craig offline. In the AMS I can generate many months in advance for PM or PdM. And these already have future dates - thus not a problem. But..... repair work ...is the challenge. Either way we call this maintenance weekly schedule of which 80% have never succeeded.