Excel tool · Planning & Scheduling

Put a dollar figure on your maintenance productivity gap

Estimate your current wrench time, see where the hours are going, and calculate the value of implementing or improving planning & scheduling, in one simple Excel tool.

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Wrench Time Calculator

Who and when

Who this is for and when to use it

This calculator is for maintenance managers, planners and reliability engineers who need to convince someone (a manager, a leadership team, or themselves) that planning & scheduling is worth the investment. Use it when leadership is asking what the backlog and downtime are actually costing, when you need a business case with a number on it, or when you suspect your technicians spend most of their day waiting, travelling and searching and you want to quantify it.

The case

Why it matters

In most reactive plants, technicians get two to three productive hours out of an eight-hour shift. The rest disappears into waiting for parts, waiting for permits, travelling, and searching for information. Nobody’s lazy. The work just isn’t planned and scheduled.

That waste is invisible until you put a number on it. The calculator estimates your current wrench time and converts the gap into dollars per year, which is usually the moment planning & scheduling stops being a nice-to-have and becomes an obvious decision.

What's inside

What you get

A simple Excel tool that estimates your current maintenance productivity (wrench time)
A breakdown of where you're losing productive hours
A calculation of the annual dollar value of implementing or improving planning & scheduling
PC and Mac versions (the tool uses a couple of macros to make it easy to use)

Wrench Time Calculator value model: estimating the dollar value of maintenance planning & scheduling

Step by step

How to use it

Download the version for your system: PC or Mac.
Enter your team size, labour rates and rough estimates of how time is spent. Estimates are fine. The result is directional, and it's usually conservative.
Review the dollar figure and the productivity breakdown.
Use it as the centrepiece of your business case. Our article How to sell planning & scheduling to your CEO shows you how.

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