Planning and Scheduling

Doc Palmer wonders whether your maintenance staff is sized for firefighting or for profitability.

Doc Palmer says individual work orders are key so managers can help keep things on track, especially emergency work.

Jeff Shiver says unlock the potential of your historical data by transforming it into a library of reusable job plans.

Doc Palmer says hyper-accurate labor estimating gets in the way of both completed work and higher quality work.

Doc Palmer says it’s a useful metric but is a lagging indicator that depends on how “planned jobs” are defined and managed.

Doc Palmer says schedule compliance is really a window into opportunities for improvement, and not just a reason to blame the supervisor.

Work orders are the source of truth for the maintenance or repair of each asset, and they need to be managed effectively.

Doc Palmer says the keys to controlling planning and scheduling are people-related.

Doc Palmer says maintenance is not a necessary evil. It is an investment in production.

Doc Palmer says the unusual principles of planning and scheduling can take some culture adjustment, but will quickly increase job execution.

Doc Palmer says Reactive maintenance that isn’t an emergency will benefit from a quick plan and a day or weeks head start.

Doc Palmer says maintenance workers will get more work done when loaded with a full schedule and the flexibility to break it.

Doc Palmer says a daily schedule will focus that day’s work, but supervisors need the flexibility to react to unplanned work.

Doc Palmer says frontline supervisors are the key to accepting that it's okay to break a fully loaded schedule.

Doc Palmer says planned work should do more than keep crews busy; 100% schedule loading gets more work done.

With the upcoming week’s worth of planned jobs, Doc Palmer says bundle in backlog work orders in the same area.