All right, welcome to lesson five of module six in which we’ll look at scheduling as a continuous process. Now, this is going to be another short lesson with a couple of key points.
00:21
The first is that you need to see scheduling as a continuous process. And to better visualise this, I will compare scheduling to a conveyor belt with buckets of work that a scheduler needs to fill. Looking at scheduling this way will help you to understand how the continuous development of the frozen weekly schedule works and how it combines with developing a draft schedule for future weeks.
00:42
The second key point is that the scheduling process can only work if the maintenance supervisor and the maintenance planner play their parts in the process too. And using that conveyor belt analogy will make this very, very clear.
00:53
In this module, we’ve talked a lot about scheduling about building your frozen weekly schedule. Let’s take that a step further. In this lesson, I want you to take a slightly wider look at the process of scheduling, and so I want you to imagine your scheduling process as a conveyor belt. Your weekly schedules are represented as buckets on this conveyor where the size of the bucket represents the amount of labor you have available. The current week is week one, next week is week two, and so on. And as time progresses, the buckets that are sitting out in the future, they come closer to you. They’re moving to the left on the conveyor belt. And as a scheduler, it is your job to fill these weekly buckets with the maintenance work orders. And that’s what you see here.
01:34
The weekly buckets are now partially filled, overfilled, or perfectly filled with work orders. The horizontal blocks are your preventive maintenance tasks and the vertical blocks are your corrective maintenance tasks. White blocks represent work orders that still require planning. Blue blocks are fully planned. And the green blocks are work that is ready to execute.
01:54
Now, remember, those statuses are maintained by the planner but it’s down to the scheduler to make sure that the work is sitting in the right bucket. Of course, the scheduler does also need to work within any constraints set by the planner. If for example, the planner has set a job so that it cannot start before week eight, then the scheduler can’t just go ahead and schedule that for week six. But the scheduler can delay it to week nine or week 10.
02:18
So one of the things we want to see here on this conveyor belt is that we only want to see green blocks in the current week, the frozen week, and of course, mostly green in next week, week two, and the week after. And as you look further out, you’ll see that you see less and less green and more and more blue. And as we go further out, you’ll see that most of the work is actually white, which means that the work still needs to be planned.
02:40
And if you look in the current frozen week, you’ll see indeed that there are only green blocks in these buckets. And the bucket is neatly filled to the top, which means we are utilising 100% of our available labor capacity.
02:54
Now, when you look in the following weeks, the draft weeks, which in this case are the next three weeks, you can see that next week is neatly filled and almost green with just one blue block. The single blue block might mean that it’s fully planned, but the planner hasn’t yet confirmed if the materials are available on site and therefore, hasn’t marked the work order as “ready to execute”. That means that before the frozen weekly schedule is starting next week, the planner needs to confirm to the scheduler or in the CMMS, that the work order is indeed ready to execute or not. Otherwise, the scheduler needs to defer that job from week two to, say, week three or week four and bring a green job from a future week forward to keep the capacity correct.
03:34
So let’s assume we swap the blue block sitting in week two with a green block sitting in week three. So now week two is good to go, just in time for our weekly schedule review meeting later this week. But the. scheduler also needs to have a look at week three and week four. There’s still a few jobs in there that need planning, i.e. they’re white, and the scheduler will have to see if these white blocks should also be deferred to a later week, like for example, week six or week seven, especially week seven because our bucket is actually still quite empty and we have plenty of labor capacity available. That could be that some of those jobs just don’t need much planning, and maybe they just require parts that are already in stock, in which case they could be left in weeks three and four, especially if they were high priority work.
04:16
But the question is: Unless they have been planned, how would you know, right? So the sensible approach will be to move all white blocks out of week three and week four and only leave the green blocks, and maybe some high priority blue blocks where we would expect to get the outstanding services and materials confirmed before their respective week commences.
04:37
Essentially what I’m saying here is that obviously 4or the frozen week all the blocks need to be green. For week two, week three, and week four, you really want to see mostly green blocks, especially in week two, and then maybe some blue blocks for weeks three and four. And only by exception would you allow to have some white blocks, work that still needs planning sitting in those weeks. Only by exception.
04:59
So once we’ve done this, our conveyor belt will be like what you see here. We’ve moved all the white blocks that still require planning to future weeks and we’ve kept a number of blue blocks, in the draft schedules for week three and week four, because they are high priority work that is best done combined with some other work that’s maybe already scheduled in those weeks. And that’s fine. And then when we look at week two, the scheduler is going to take another view on this, and if the planner has not yet converted those fully planned work orders to ready to execute, we’re simply going to reschedule them to future weeks and bring some other green blocks forward.
05:30
Now, as part of this look, the scheduler will also have noticed that the capacity is quite reduced in week four and we have loaded too much work in that week. But in this case, the scheduler has decided not to change that just yet until he or she knows exactly what work will be ready to execute. At this point, it’s fine to have a bucket that is, say, three weeks away for it to be overloaded to some degree. That is reality. And I don’t want to just show you a perfect picture because these things are going to happen in your plant either. And it’s up to your scheduler to deal with these capacity issues on a weekly basis.
06:02
Now, when you look at scheduling like this, as a conveyor belt where the buckets are moving to the left, coming closer to you, you can also immediately see why it’s so important that your planner maintains accurate work order statuses for work that is fully planned and for work that is ready to execute. Because your scheduler totally relies on those work order statuses to create a high quality, robust weekly schedule and to create draft schedules for future weeks.
06:29
You can also see that it’s key for your maintenance supervisor to advise the scheduler of any capacity changes so that the size of the bucket is adjusted when required. If that’s always done at the last moment, that creates a lot of rework for your scheduler. And that rework will result in your scheduler having less time to put together a solid draft schedule for future weeks.
06:50
Another thing I want to show you is what happens in the scheduling process when we have emergency work break into the frozen week. If that happens, we’re going to have work that was ready to execute that we don’t complete. And because emergency work is planned on the fly, we’re going to execute it with lower productivity. So a job that would only take two hours if it was fully planned and ready to go, could now easily take four, six, maybe eight hours as we’re scrambling to get isolations in place, find materials, find parts, et cetera.
07:20
And so we’re going to have to reschedule quite a lot of work out of the frozen week, and probably into next week, week two, which then would mean we would need to reschedule work from week two to week three and from week three to week four and so on and so forth. So you can see the ripple effect this single emergency job can have because we had to break into the frozen weekly schedule. And you can also see how this leads to potentially a lot of work for your scheduler and can potentially upset your draft schedule for the next three or four weeks. This is another reason why it’s so important to protect your schedule and keep emergency maintenance to an absolute minimum.
07:57
So when it comes to the role of the scheduler, using this conveyor belt analogy, you can quite quickly see the key roles and responsibilities of the scheduler. The first is to maintain your labor capacities, which are represented by the size of the buckets. Now, in reality, of course, you have multiple buckets per week, one bucket per trade like we discussed earlier. But to simplify the concept of the conveyor belt, I’ve just used a single bucket here.
08:20
The second role of the scheduler is then to level the workload by distributing the PMs and the CMs across those buckets on the conveyor belt. And as this is done, you want to make sure your scheduler is grouping work together to drive efficiency, both for your crew and for operations, by minimising isolations, and of course, to minimise equipment downtime. Now, this all needs to be done recognising the work order priorities and the target due dates.
08:37
And of course, the scheduler also needs to make sure the frozen week only includes those green blocks those jobs that are ready to execute and that future draft weeks are mostly green blocks with some blue blocks. And only by exception should they include the white blocks, the work that still needs planning.
09:01
And the last role is for the scheduler to reschedule work from the frozen week if it was not completed. Now, that could be due to an emergency break as we just discussed earlier, or maybe something else happened that simply stopped us from completing the work this week.
09:14
This is not a full and complete job description of the scheduler of course, but it certainly gives you a good idea of the role of the scheduler in the continuous planning and scheduling process.
09:23
Okay. So that brings me to the end of this lesson. As we discussed, scheduling really is a continuous process. It’s a conveyor belt of buckets of work that the scheduler needs to continuously fill to capacity based on priority, due dates, and keeping in mind the grouping of work. We also saw how important it is for the maintenance supervisor to advise the scheduler of future labor capacities, the size of the buckets, and for the planner to make accurate work order statuses available in the CMMS so that the scheduler can identify the fully planned and ready to execute work If the people in either of these roles are not fulfilling their role, or not consistently or not accurately, your scheduling process will suffer. In fact, it will fail. This is really important to keep in mind and it is really important to make sure your maintenance planner and your maintenance supervisor understand the role they play in the scheduling process.
