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Course Video #2:

What is maintenance planning & scheduling?

This is a free sample from the course Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling (PS100).

Key points

In this lesson, I talk about the value of planning and scheduling. I’m going to do that by walking through a detailed example in which I’m going to show you how you can increase your workforce by 35% without hiring anyone. Instead, you’re going to get 35% higher output from your existing workforce. And I’ll show you how to put a dollar value on that productivity increase.

And that is something very important, for when you are communicating with management in your organization to sell them the concept of planning and scheduling, being able to express the value of scheduling and planning in dollar terms will make it much easier to get management support. The key points I want students to take away from this lesson are:

What you’ll learn

This video is one of the 48 video lessons contained in the course “Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling”.

Some of the other things we discuss in this module are:

  • The bigger picture of why Maintenance Planning & Scheduling is important to your success
  • The basic elements of a maintenance planning & scheduling process
  • How waste occurs in maintenance
  • How we use planning & scheduling to tackle this waste and become more efficient
  • Do you have protective functions? Do they have failure-finding tasks assigned?


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Please note: if you are interested in the course in one of these languages either with subtitles or with a voiceover in your native language, please contact me directly. We are working hard on getting the course translated into all these languages, but this will take some time.
Video Transcript - LESSON 2.4

The Value of Planning and Scheduling

Hi there and welcome to lesson four of module two in which I’m going to talk about the value of planning and scheduling. I’m going to do that by working through a detailed example in which I’ll show you how you can increase your workforce by 35% without hiring anyone. Instead, you’ll get 35% more output from your existing workforce. And I’ll show you how to put a dollar value on that productivity increase. And that is important, because when you engage with management in your organisation to sell the concept of planning and scheduling, being able to express the benefits of planning and scheduling in dollar terms will make it much easier to get management support.

00:49

The key points that I want you to take away from this lesson are first with planning and scheduling, a typical maintenance organisation can increase their workforce by about 35% without hiring any more people. You do this simply by being more efficient and getting more work done with your existing resources. And the second key point is that the value that planning and scheduling brings to an organisation can be expressed in monetary gains. I.e., it can be expressed in real hard dollars and that is important, because that is the language that management understands and so that is the language that you need to be able to speak.

01:22

Now in the previous lesson, we talked a lot about waste in a typical maintenance organisation and we saw there were many areas where waste occurs in a maintenance organisation, and we talked briefly how planning and scheduling reduces that waste. And in lesson, three we also talked about the fact that typical productivity or wrench time in industry is about 30%. Now in this lesson, we’ll explore the value we create when we implement planning and scheduling and increase that productivity to a typical 45%. You see, 45% is typically what you can achieve if you put in place an effective planning and scheduling process, and it should be achievable for just about any maintenance team out there. 

02:00

Now, the example we’re going to discuss is the example that is in the wrench time calculator that you can download from the article “How to Sell Planning and Scheduling to Your CEO” on our website. And so you may have actually downloaded it before joining this course, but if you haven’t, there’s a link to download the spreadsheet in the resource section of this lesson. It’s a very simple but powerful little calculator and helps you to estimate your current wrench time and then determines the value you can create for your organisation by implementing our significantly improving maintenance planning and scheduling You don’t need to download it right now, as I’m going to walk you through the calculations, in more general terms first, but you will need to get yourself a copy as you’ll need it for the assignment that’s included with this lesson.

02:47

All right, so let’s start. Now, in this example, we’re going to assume we have a relatively small organisation with 20 maintenance technicians. These technicians work five 10-hour shifts each week for 48 weeks per year, and their current productivity is a typical industry average of 30%. So every week, our 20 technicians work five shifts of 10 hours. That means every week our 20 technicians work a thousand hours. times 10 hours per shift, gives us 1,000 hours per week. And we already said that their productivity or wrench time is a typical 30%, and you can assess that in the wrench time calculator by looking at specific jobs as an example.

03:24

But for now we’re assuming that we’re taking a 30% wrench time. That means, out of the thousands of hours of work we do per week, only 300 hours per week are actually productive maintenance hours. Which is 1,000 hours times the 30% wrench time, which gives us our 300 productive hours, 300 hours tool time. Now, we’re going to implement planning and scheduling in this organisation and we’re going to eventually, after maybe about six months, achieve a maintenance productivity or wrench time of 45%. So we’re going to increase the wrench time from an initial 30% to 45%. But as part of selling the value of planning and scheduling to our leadership, to the management of our organisation, we promised that we would not do this with more people. We said we could do this without hiring extra people. Now, that creates a bit of a challenge as for planning and scheduling to work, we actually do need to have a planner and a scheduler in place. And since we were dealing with a reactive maintenance organisation, we’re assuming that we didn’t actually have those roles in that didn’t have them filled.

04:28

So what we’re going to do, is we’re going to take some of our technicians and use them to fill the planner role and the scheduler role. A typical industry ratio of the number of technicians a planner can plan for is about 1:20, maybe to 1:30 if you’re very mature. So that means that one planner should be able to plan for the work of 20 or 30 technicians. We’re going to assume the bottom end of that ratio. So we’ll assume we need one planner. Let’s also assume we’d take one technician and convert her or him to our scheduler.

04:58

That now leaves us with 18 technicians to do the actual maintenance work, which is clearly a reduction in available manpower compared to the original 20 technicians. So how is this going to work? Well, let’s work through numbers again. We now have 18 technicians who work five shifts per week with 10 hours per shifts, right? Which gives us 18 technicians times 10 hours times five shifts is 900 hours per week, which is a 10% reduction from the original 1,000 hours per week. Which makes sense, because we took away two technicians out of the 20 which is also 10%, right? So we’ve actually reduced our available hours by 10%. But having implemented planning and scheduling, after about six months, our wrench time, our productivity has increased. It is now no longer 30% but a more reasonable 45% and that means we now get which is 405 productive hours per week. So even though we reduced our number of technicians, we’ve actually gained 105 productive hours in a single week. That is 35% increase in productivity.

06:06

Now, the traditional way to increase your man hours by 35% from a 20 man crew, would be to hire another seven technicians, which is 35% times 20. And that is the beauty of maintenance planning and scheduling. We achieved that same 35% increase in productivity without recruiting any additional staff. In fact, we have two less technicians and that is exactly what this magical formula shows. The productivity of 18 technicians supported by a planner and a scheduler is actually equal to the productivity of 27 technicians without planning and scheduling. And so, 18 plus two actually equals 27.

06:42

Now, that we have defined the productivity gain in man hours, we can actually put a dollar value against that, and that is exactly what the wrench time calculator does for you. And of course this varies to where you are in the world and what skill set they have et cetera. But we’ll take around a number of $100 per hour. And remember, that should be the total cost to the company. That’s not what a technician earn, that’s not what they take home. That is the cost to the company. So we’re going to assume $100 per hour per technician, and we can see that the 35% productivity gain across our crew of 20 technicians would be worth more than half a million per year. That is each and every year.

07:16

So by implementing planning and scheduling in a crew of 20 people, we have gained monetary value of half a million dollars per year. Now you can imagine in a large scale industrial organisation with potentially hundreds of technicians, contractors, or staff, the value of planning and scheduling can quickly run in the millions of dollars per year. But even in a relatively small organisation, the value is really significant. And remember, the value is only one part. We’re really doing this so that we can break through the reactive maintenance cycle and improve reliability in the longer term. And that is where even bigger monetary gains will come from.

07:39

Also remember, when you price the cost of your technicians per hour, you really need to make sure you use a total cost to the company, which is what I just mentioned before, which is typically a lot more than the rate of technicians. Typically, it’s 60 or 70% more, So make sure you use the right labor cost Now look, it doesn’t have to be totally accurate to the last dollar, but you don’t want to be miles off either. And it is important to get right, because this is the number that management is going to be excited about, or at least they should. So you want to make sure that the number is robust.

08:22

Now remember, what we saw here is a rather simplistic example to demonstrate the value of planning and scheduling that you can bring to an organisation. In real life, things do and get a litte bit more complicated. For example, there’s many ways that you can set up your planner and scheduler roles. And this is something we’re going to talk about more later in the course in module four on planning and module six on scheduling. For example, in small organisations you might struggle to have separate planners and scheduler roles and may therefore have to combine those roles to a single planner and scheduler. That’s not my favorite solution, but sometimes, it’s just required. In small organisations, you do not have much choice. In larger organisations or organisations that operate really large complex plants, may typically opt for multiple planners, in which case you probably have a planner which only plans for a specific trade.

09:12

And the bottom line is that you really need to consider your organisational requirements and then use those to adjust your assumptions in the wrench time calculator. And a great thing about the wrench time calculator is that you can very easily play around with your assumptions. It literally takes no more than a minute to figure out if your organisation could support for example, three planners and a scheduler and still increase productivity and get a substantial monetary gain. I’ll show you this a little bit later in the demonstration of the tool.

09:40

Now, just a little bit on wrench time assumptions, because ultimately, you will need to make an assumption when you put this together. Without planning and scheduling, typically your wrench time that you see in an industrial maintenance organisation is 30%, but it can actually be a lot lower. I’ve seen organisations with wrench times in the teams, i.e. around 15%. When you implement a sustained and effective maintenance planning and scheduling process and it’s running and it’s running well, you should be able to get wrench times of around 45%. World-class organisations achieve wrench times of 55% upwards, maybe 60%. But not high. But please, do not use that as an assumption when you build your business case, because getting to world-class is really a long, really hard journey, which kind of take a lot more effort and a lot more time to get to the basic 45% wrench time. And not many organisations will ever get to world class performance or may not need to. So don’t go much higher than 45% in your assumption.

10:42

Getting to 45% productivity is really realistic, it’s achievable, and it’s really a good place to start with that assumption Now if your current productivity is really low, so if you are one of those organisations that has wrench times in the teams, i.e. 15%, maybe start with a lower target of say 35% or 40%. Keeping it realistic will really help you to sell the concept to your organisation, and it then gives you the ability to exceed your target and do really well and give good news to management. That’s always a good thing to do. Now in the next couple of minutes, I’ll just walk you through the actual wrench time calculator. It will be quick, but it’s just to give you a feel for how the tool works. All right. If you don’t already have a copy of the wrench time calculator, like I said earlier, you can download it from the resources section in this lesson. If you have already a copy that you downloaded from our website you can use that. It’s essentially the same calculator. First, we’ll use the calculator in the next video to determine your current maintenance productivity. When you do that, you need to be honest with yourself and list down all your non-productive work and categorie. Then in the final video, we’ll calculate the dollar value that you can get if you increase your current productivity to a target productivity of 45%. We’re going to consider your shift duration, your shift hours, and number of technicians, all those different assumptions to calculate that monetary value.

Video 2

All right. So in this video, we’re going to go ahead and talk about how to use the wrench time calculator to calculate, to estimate your current productivity. So go ahead and fire it up, open the spreadsheet, if you can, so that you can walk with me as you listen and watch this video. Otherwise, you know, obviously, just watch the video and it will become clear how to use it, because it’s really quite a simple tool. So when you open up the spreadsheet, you’re going to basically see this title screen. It has a link to the article that I talked about earlier, that’s the other article that’s titled, “How to Sell Planning and Scheduling to Your CEO”, and there’s two buttons.

00:34

The first button says, “The Problem.” And the second button says, “The Value.” Now, those buttons and those steps link back to sections in the article I just mentioned. The first step, The Problem, is basically going to take you to a worksheet where you can enter your data and estimate your maintenance productivity. The second button, The Value, will take you to another worksheet, which you can then use to take that estimated productivity as an input and estimate total value you can gain by improving or implementing planning and scheduling in your organisation.

01:08

All right. So let’s have a look at that first worksheet, The Problem. So when you open that up, this is what you basically see. There on the left hand side of the screen are two tables, and on the right you see a chart. The first table here on the left, that says, “Shift Productivity,” allows you to enter against a number of different activities, the time that you are not actually working productively, not actually doing maintenance as during shift. So let’s have a look at that in a little bit more detail. The first cell you need to fill in is actually here at the bottom and it says, “Total Shift Time.” And at the moment it says, “10 hours.” Which means that for your maintenance shift, you’re assuming for their shift duration is 10 hours. And so, then what you do in the area above, in this section, you write down all the different types of lost time, all your nonproductive time, all the things that your maintenance technicians are required to do that is not actually tool time.

02:05

So what you see here is, I’ve assumed that your technicians require 20 minutes per day to receive their instructions from their supervisor. After that, they might spend 30 minutes to isolate the equipment and to apply their own personal logs as part of your lockout, and tying out procedure. The next is the travel to and from the work site. Now here, I’ve allowed 90 minutes. It’s quite a lot. I’m assuming that you’ve got a large site, large complex site like a big refinery or big industrial plant. And at the beginning of the day, technicians have to travel to their work site, Then mid-morning, they would travel back for their break, then they go back to the work site. They do the same for lunch, they do the same for the mid-afternoon break and then they travel at the end of day. So there’s a lot of walking to and from. Now, 90 minutes, may be way too much for your site, it could be too little if you have a very dispersed geographical group of assests that you’re managing. It totally depends on your organisational circumstances.

02:59

The next allowance is 60 minutes to basically collect their parts, finding additional parts, all those kind of things. Maybe 30 minutes for communication delays, waiting on clarifications from the supervisor. We’ve got 60 minutes for authorised breaks. So that’s 20 minutes in the morning, and maybe 20 minutes for lunch. That may be too little. It doesn’t really matter. You just need to put in what specific for your organisation. There’s a little bit in here for idle time that happens at the job site. I mean, when the guys are working and getting ready, there’s always a bit of time where they need to set up they might have a five-minute chat. You can include that. I’ve included idle time. You could also call it a bit of setup time.

03:41

And that’s the other thing here is, what you see here is, all these cells that are gray with blue text those are cells you can change. So you can change these descriptions. So what’s in here is an example is not something you have to stick to. You can adjust it to what suits you. The next row I’ve put in here are some late starts and early quits. because, you know, that happens, right? We’re all human, meaning people finish their job a little bit early. And so 5 or 10 minutes before their shift finishes, they can’t really start a new job, so they will wrap up and finish. It could be 10 minutes, it could be 30 minutes, you may have a very disciplined workforce in which case it’s maybe just zero. The next line item I’ve put in here is clean up. Every site needs to be cleaned up at the end of the day. So you’ve got to allow some time for that. Same with paperwork, closing out your work orders, closing out your permits, et cetera. There is a line item for excessive personal time. So that maybe people are taking some time to check a phone or send a personal email, et cetera. Now, you may be inclined not to include all those things, but you really want to try and be as complete and as accurate and as reflective of reality as possible. 

04:50

So put all those different non-productive categories in there. Add up the duration and then you see what the remaining productive time is left. In this case, that’s 180 minutes. And then what you see here in the section below, that automatically summarises it in hours. So non-productive, seven hours, total shift time, 10 hours, productive time, actually doing maintenance hands on tool is three hours, which gives you a wrench time of 30% and that’s what you see reflected in the pie chart here on the right. Now, you may think that seems a little bit excessive, but let me tell you honestly, that is a very very fair representation of what an average work site looks like. Sure, the non-productive categories that are shown there may be quite different from site to site, you may call it different things, but that 30% is really, very very typical of an average industrial site and their productivity. All right, so that fills in that first table here on the left shift productivity.

05:49

The second table that’s right next to it is the productivity of a typical job, and that just to allow you to do essentially the same analysis but not at a shift level, but as a job level for a single job. So instead of doing it for a whole day, you’d just say, “Okay, I’m going to pick one job and I’m going to basically analyse what my delays are and I’m going to use that to give me an estimate of our wrench time.” And it’s up to which one you want to use, which method, you want to use, it doesn’t really matter. Both will give you an approximation of your wrench time.

06:21

So, the way this one works is a little bit different, but the principle is the same. You enter your non-productive categories and their durations. Now again, this is in minutes, and then at the bottom here, instead of an automatic sum, what you do here is you don’t put in your shift time, but you actually enter the time to do the job, the actual tool time. So in this case, what you’ll see is that I’ve entered in, it takes an hour or 60 minutes to do the actual job. And above here, are all the delays associated with doing that one job that takes one hour. So, in this case, the non-productive time is two hours. It is one hour to do the job, which is what I entered here, and it shows back up down here. The total time is three hours and that gives us the wrench time of 33%. Now, if you click on the button below, you’ll actually show the chart that is associated with analysing your productivity of that one single job.

07:18

And so what you need to do with this step is basically analyse your productivity, either using the shift view, a more generalised overall view of your whole group of technicians, or analysing a typical job Or maybe do both. It depends. Often you find that some people like the approach of looking at just a typical job, because that just means more to them, it’s easier to visualise for them. At the same time, people will then very often say, “Ah yeah, but that was just that one job.” which is why it can be handy to have the overview of shift productivity too. Or which is maybe the best solution, is to actually do both and see how that pans out. But the most important thing here is to be really really honest and to be really really clear on where your delays are. And make sure what you enter is fact-based and aligns with what you and your team observed out there in the plant in real life.

08:13 

And so one good thing that would be really good to do is to go out on site, and have a look at some jobs and see where the delays are and maybe record that, or analyse three or four different jobs during a day or a period of time, and just come up with some typical values from the different delay categories to give you an approximate wrench time. And remember, at this point, really what you want to do is an estimate, a high level estimate of your wrench time. We’re talking 25%, 35%, 45%, you don’t want to get it down to very accurate percentages, That level of detail is not required at this point.

Now, let’s quickly summarise what we’ve talked about. In this step, what we’re doing is we’re estimating our current maintenance productivity. And the goal is to determine the problem your organisation is facing and the size of that problem. You know, the problem is your poor wrench time and what you’re trying to do is assess how poor that is or how good that is.

Now, there are only two steps to this really. You start by entering your total shift time at the bottom of the sheet, and then you identify and record all the lost time and nonproductive categories during the shift. And that includes the task your maintenance technicians are required to do, but are not really related to the actual tool time. And as we talked about, you can use either the shift view or the job view or both to assess this. And remember, the gray cells with blue text are editable. So you can add or remove descriptions based on the non-productive work You observe in your organisation. Remember, it’s crucial that you’re honest with yourself and you’re very clear about the delays that you provide into the tool. Ensure the information you enter is factual and based on observations.

Once you’ve recorded the lost time, the tool will automatically calculate your remaining productive time, the wrench time, and that will be updated in the pie chart. And keep in mind, keep in mind, I’ve said it many times which is really important that the average wrench time for an average industrial site is typically around 30%.

Video 3

All right, we’ll go to the next tab, which is down here, And this is the part of the wrench time calculator where we’re going to calculate the value your organisation can get from planning and scheduling. In this step, we’ll use your current maintenance productivity, which we calculated, estimated in the last video. Now, I’m going to assume we’re running with the 30% that was already sitting here. Now, this worksheet works in the same way as the previous one in that the gray cells with the blue text are the ones that you can change. And what this sheet does is basically allowing you to calculate what value planning and scheduling could bring to your organisation if you increased your current productivity, to the target productivity of 45%. So again, what I’m assuming here is current productivity, 30%, and that is the 30% that I got from the previous steps. So if you got 25% or 27%, you use that.

00:50

And then I’m going to assume a target productivity, once I’ve got planning and scheduling in place of 45% And again, like I said before, that’s the number I would recommend you use. It is a typical number that is very achievable. It’s not world-class, but it is going to get you significant benefit. And for almost all organisations, it’s very realistic to achieve. Now, the next thing I need to do is enter in some more detailed numbers around the number of personnel you have, the shift duration, and the shift hours, et cetera, so that we can calculate the value.

1:22

So the next cell to enter is your shift duration in hours. So here, I’ve just assumed that we work 10 hours a day, five shifts per week. So, five days per week, 10 hours per day. Now, we’re going to assume that we’re going to work 48 weeks per year and we have 20 technicians. Now, in terms of the hourly technician rate that you see here is I’ve assumed $100 we talked about earlier. And that is basically the cost of having a technician work at our site for one hour. And again, that is not necessarily or it is not what the technician actually takes home himself, but that’s what it would cost to the business. The next cell you see below that is the first calculation, and it basically calculates the number of productive hours per week. And that is simply saying how many productive hours, how many real maintenance hours you should get out of your pool of technicians.

02:12

All right, so that is basically multiplying the number of shifts and the number of hours per shift multiplied by your technicians, and obviously, the number of technicians. So, in our case, we have a 10-hour shift with 20 technicians, so that’s 200 hours per day and we work five shifts per week. So we have in essence 1,000 hours at our disposal. But because we only have a productivity of 30%, we will now only be able to actually execute maintenance, real maintenance, hands on tool time for 300 hours. That is the number before we implement planning and scheduling. Now, we’re going to implement planning and scheduling. And as I explained earlier in the video, we’re going to assume that we do that with no change in headcount. Now, I described the assumptions for that and the reasons for that in the article that’s actually linked in the tool and in the resource section. The article, “How to Sell Planning and Scheduling to your C E O.” And the reason we go with no headcount increase is that it’s much easier to sell internally in your organisation.

03:14

So what we’re assuming here is, we have 20 technicians and we’re going to take one of those to become a planner and we’re going to take one of them to become a scheduler. And so now, we no longer have 20 technicians, but we have 18 technicians as we discussed earlier in the previous video. So now we have 18 technicians working 10 hour days, five shifts per week. So we actually have less hours available in total. But because we’ve implemented planning and scheduling, our overall productivity is increasing from 30% to 45%. Our total productive hours per week are now actually 405. Which means we’ve gained 105 productive hours per week we’ve talked about earlier. So even though we’ve taken two technicians out of our pool and made them a planner and a scheduler, we’ve actually increased the productive hours of the whole crew. And in fact, we’ve increased the total productive hours by 35%. And that is what you see summarised in the charts to the right. So the pie chart that you see here shows your current productivity, and your non-productive time. It analyses your productive hours per year, your non-productive hours per year and the value of that productive time and non-productive time.

04:22

And then the chart on the right shows you your planning and scheduling state. So once you’ve implemented or significantly improved planning and scheduling, your productive time has increased from 30% to 45%. And so, your productive hours per year have increased from 14,400 to 19,440. And your nonproductive hours have come down correspondingly Now, if you look at the value of the productive time that we had, that was about $1.4 million. Now, we’ve increased that productive time to $1.9 million. So the total gain is about half a million dollars per year. And that gain is basically what you get extra out of your technicians but expressed in a dollar value.

05:01

Rather than saying, “We get 5000 more productive hours,” we’re actually saying, “We’re getting 5000 more which is worth half a million dollars per year.” That’s the kind of language that your management, your leadership, your CEO would understand and appreciate. And that’s really all there is to it. That is how simple the wrench time calculator is. So all you need to do is to enter the specific values for your plant, your current productivity, your desired end productivity. And then make sure you have realistic assumption for those, enter the number of shifts, the working hours, the number of technicians, and then the tool will make the calculation it needs to make.

05:39

Now, let me just do one quick example and we’ll see how it works. So let’s assume we have a slightly less efficient plant to begin with, And we see immediately that the chart here on the right is updated. We’ll also assume that we’ll also achieve a little bit less, because we have a bigger step change to make. So we’re going to end up with a target productivity of 40% after we’ve implemented planning and scheduling. Now, we’re going to run the same shift duration and we’ll continue to do five shifts per week, But we’re going to assume that we have a much larger asset, a much larger plant that we’re doing this for. So we’re going to assume that we have 75 maintenance technicians that we now need to plan and schedule for.

06:22

And let’s assume that we work in environment where the value or the cost of our technicians is also a little bit lower. So let’s assume that our cost is $80 per hour. Okay, so now, we have 75 technicians, the next field we need to enter is a number of planners. Now, you can’t have one planner planning for 75 technicians. That’s not going to work. And that’s what you see below here. That’s the planner per technician ratio, right? 1:75 simply doesn’t work.

06:48

Now, as I say in the notes here, if you have a stable system and you’re very experienced planner, your planner should be able to plan for 20 to 30 technicians. But that really depends on your environment. It depends also on how well, for example, your PM system is set up. It depends on how many failures you have. It depends on how reactive your organisation is. So typically, this is the ratio that’s lower in the beginning and then increases over time. So we’re going to assume that we have five planners, five planners. Now, I know it sounds like a lot. But that gives us a ratio of 1:15, which is pretty reasonable. Now, in terms of the schedulers, I’m always a fan of having one scheduler per site so that you can really integrate. Let’s assume though that that might be a little bit too much to begin with and we have to find a way to break up the scheduling across two schedulers.

07:35

Right. So now what we have actually done is we’ve taken a crew of 75 technicians and we’ve taken seven people out, right? Seven people are out. So because the number of technicians we now have left is 68, because we’ve taken five planners away and we have two schedulers. So we only have 68 technicians left to work. We’re increasing our productivity from 25% to 40% as you can see summarised in the chart here. But again, we’ve lost seven technicians. But even though we’ve lost seven technicians, because we are increasing our productivity from 25% to 40%, the value that we’re gaining, the value the planning and scheduling brings to our organisation with a total pool of 75 technicians is $1.6 million per year. And that’s a lot.

08:21

Now, you can imagine if you’re doing this for a large chemical plant, or a large manufacturing asset, or a refinery, or an oil and gas installation, or a mine, or another large asset intensive organisations with a big maintenance burden, you can see the value that planning and scheduling can bring to the table is massive. In this case, we’ve assumed that end state of 40% productivity, which is not that great. It would be quite realistic to eventually drive it up to 45%. That would be very, very realistic. In which case, there’ll more than $2.2 million in additional value compared to the starting point.

08:24

All right, so that was a not so quick overview of the wrench time calculator. I’ve probably discussed it in a little bit more detail than I was intending to, but I do think it’s useful. So please, do take the time to actually do this exercise. Go and download the wrench time calculator, fill it in, play around with your assumptions, test them out. Even better, work with some of your colleagues in a small group and work through this in it as a team and get to the numbers. And I suspect you’ll be quite surprised by the potential value your organisation can achieve by improving or implementing planning and scheduling.

09:31

All right. Now, that brings us to the end of this lesson. It’s been a long lesson. This lesson was all about demonstrating the value of planning and scheduling. Now, before I wrap up, before I close off this lesson I just want to remind you of the key points of this lesson. And they were that planning and scheduling is going to allow you to increase your productivity by about 35%, from the typical 30% wrench time to a more reasonable productivity of 45%. And secondly, you can show that productivity gain as a monetary gain expressed in hard dollars, and being able to do that will be very valuable when you engage with senior management with leadership to sell the concept of planning and scheduling. 

PS100: Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling

Learn what maintenance planning & scheduling is, how it creates value in an industrial plant and how to successfully implement it.

This course includes:
Leave a comment below telling us what types of maintenance you use and why. Have you had great results with one specific type of maintenance let us know: