No One Wants to Talk About Automated Weekly Scheduling

Planning and Scheduling are 2 Different Topics

There is an obvious difference between planning and scheduling. The latter assigns dates. But both contribute to productivity, coordination, quality, and job/personnel safety.

Weekly Maintenance Scheduling is Focus of this Article

Very few organizations, believe it or not, have ever created a resource leveled weekly schedule. There are several reasons but one is, the base product (CMMS) does not perform this feature. You have to buy add-on scheduling tools. Therefore the user site must purchase add-on scheduling software — for both maintenance scheduling, major projects and shutdown/turnaround. In addition to those challenges, the CMMS community does not always have adequate knowledge in knowing what tools to select or what processes to implement.

Different Types of Schedules

There are schedules for operations staff and asset operating times; shutdown/turnaround/outage (STO) schedules; and major project schedules. And, then there are on-line maintenance schedules.

Purpose of Weekly Maintenance Schedule

The purpose of an on-line maintenance schedule is to (1) work on an agreed to list provided by leadership, (2) maximize craft utilization, and (3) optimize backlog reduction. Without a weekly maintenance schedule the organization may be operating in a predominantly reactive mode.

Why is Weekly Maintenance Scheduling So Hard?

90% fail at automated, resource-leveled weekly maintenance scheduling. The reasons are numerous and varied. But a lot depends on organization size. After that it is technology and data quality.

Why 90% (of Large Sites) Failed

Why 10% Succeeded

Of the large sites, 10% succeeded. This is because they have the staff, money and know-how. This group understands how to minimize data errors in the backlog by using multiple techniques to ensure data quality:

Some Simply Want to Make a Schedule for Next Week

Per the above illustrations you can see that small and mid-size that want to have a schedule, cannot. Everyone agrees that planning precedes scheduling. But does that mean a small site without planning staff is NOT ALLOWED to have a schedule? The fact remains that the planning/scheduling process is hugely dependent on the size of the organization -- and the number of planning/scheduling staff. But if you only have 10 maintenance staff (or less) then it is not practical to have dedicated planner/scheduler positions. Therefore the small manufacturing sites have to perform "field planning" as the maintenance technician.

If We Improve the Technology, We Can Then Empower the Small and Mid-Size Sites

Lets design a solution that works for any size organization whether or not you have planners. I call this the goldilocks solution. It would bepowerful yet easy. All it has to do is create a "set of work", resource balanced. Lastly, this feature would be inside the CMMS -- making it very simple to execute.

Automation, Is It Really Possible?

The current scheduling tools in the CMMS market place make this process difficult. And if it is possible, then this becomes a manual process. The reasons for this are:

1) The majority of work in the CMMS backlog is unplanned at any given moment. More to the point, it lacks craft estimates. Other than work order counts, you can't do sizing trends or resource leveling.

2) The typical range for work prioritization is generally too weak (range too narrow); and it does not accommodate other key factors such as risk, regulatory, safety, and asset criticality. If a work order is CM priority 2 and another has PM priority 2, which is more important?

3) Progressing work is done each day, but it is very important to be accurate on the day you calculate next weeks schedule. In addition, I have not seen any add-on product that accommodates ETC and restart. It’s like this doesn’t happen. The fact is, 10%-20% of all work carries over into next week. And when level-balancing a new week you should not use the original estimate. Thus, this is an on-going puzzle in the industry.

4) Lastly, the current methods for performing automated resource leveling is flawed. You simply can’t bring across all open work into one large bucket and start automatic resource deduction. And imagine a narrow filter where only one work order can go through the filter at a time. The question then becomes, “Which one goes first?” You could run out of craft resources at any moment thus the sort order is very important. Once a craft is exhausted for the week, then no more work orders would be scheduled for that craft. In summary, the individual work order selections (work sets) need individual sorts for any type of automated resource-leveling.

Analyzing the 4 Problems

So, for the above, we have identified 4 problems. If we could solve these problems then we could automate weekly maintenance scheduling inside the CMMS. The output would be a “set of work” for next week. And the craft supervisor would then manually create the daily plans in advance selecting from the weekly schedule.

Let’s Address the 4 Problems

1) Modify WPLABOR record to add 2 new columns: TYPE and SAVEPLAN. The TYPE can have FORMAL, ROUGH, and ETC for domain. Before the LABORHRS value is given on an ETC then copy formal estimate to saveplan column. If a future restart date is given, then place this on WOTRACK main.

2) Introduce a new role called Gatekeeper. This person would apply a rough estimate for all incoming work; also create an automatic rough estimate generator (activated by pushbutton) that takes Leadcraft entry and uses past (averages) labor actuals to insert WPLABOR record with new column, TYPE= ROUGH.

3) Create an application called Risk-based Work Order Prioritization Matrix. This creates a new field called RANKING. Then have this value auto populate WOTRACK Workorder table (workorder.ranking) (the entire backlog) each night.

4) Introduce an order of fire concept. This requires a new application which stores the order of fire SQL statements along with individual SORT fields. The craft deductions algorithm then uses this process order.

Life Could be Easier

The above process/program is so simple -- for the end-user -- that it could enable a janitor to single-click start the Weekly Schedule generation. Hard to believe, isn't it. But if you don't demand excellence and simplicity, it certainly won't happen.

Book: Demanding Excellence from your Asset Management System

Other Requirements

In Summary

The key word here is automatic. Even if you buy an add-on Scheduling tool, there’s a good chance you will still be doing subjective selection along with manual drag-and-drop scheduling. But, ... it will look pretty.