How smart scheduling gives manufacturers a competitive edge
Key takeaways
- Run planning as a Deming Cycle to drive continuous improvement and preserve valuable craft knowledge.
- Planners should support—not control—craftspersons by prepping jobs, not dictating every step.
- Fully load weekly schedules to maximize productivity and overcome Parkinson’s Law.
- Avoid micromanaging daily tasks; give supervisors flexibility to adapt and lead efficiently.
I was chatting with a colleague who had implemented proper planning and scheduling with great success at his company. This reliability manager related to me a conversation between himself and another colleague at a maintenance convention. “Doc, I told him that we run planning as a Deming Cycle and scheduling as fully loaded weekly buckets to defeat Parkinson’s Law.” My friend said the other professional went, “Huh?” That exchange precisely embodies both why it works and why it’s a competitive edge.
Why most planning efforts fail — and how the Deming Cycle fixes that
Proper planning has planners performing triage and saving learned lessons for qualified craftspersons. The planners give a head start translating a requester issue to a maintenance action. The head start attempts to identify the required craft skills, labor hours, job steps, parts, and special tools. The planners are limited in time to plan each job by the requirement that they must plan all the work to get it through the Deming Cycle. Kitting any parts or not depends on a lot of variables such as the certainty of the part required and service level of the storeroom.
The craftspersons execute the work and provide feedback for improving the plans for the next time. They never blindly follow the job plans. The planners improve the job plans for the next time both with feedback and as the planners have more time. Thus, planning runs a Deming Cycle of continuous improvement. The plans support ever-improving execution quality by institutionalizing craft and company knowledge over the years. Note that this approach leverages the skill of trained craftspersons by giving them a “craft historian” with the planning function.
Yet, industry most commonly runs planning as a program to tell craftspersons how to do their jobs “to improve execution quality and consistency.” The common definition of a planned job is that it includes “all” the required steps, parts, and tools, and that “all” the parts are kitted. Semantics aside, it appears that this approach implies we do not need skilled craftspersons and that perfection in plans is possible. In practice, this approach makes craftspersons resent management telling them that planners are telling them what to do.
Most companies experience great frustration with planning, and no one wants to be a planner. The planners that survive end up mostly helping craftspersons find stuff on the fly for jobs in progress because they failed to plan the job perfectly. The planners can also not plan all the work because they are helping too many jobs in progress when they are not trying to make the few jobs that they can plan perfect.
Beating Parkinson’s Law with fully loaded scheduling
Proper scheduling has schedulers (commonly the planners) fully loading a weekly schedule for each crew supervisor. The scheduler simply sorts the planned work orders by priority and age within priority, then bundles lower priority work with the higher priorities where it makes sense for efficiency. (If we send a person way out there, we could do this other job at the same time. If we lock out this system, we might as well do these other two jobs on that system.)
The scheduler then matches the list against the total crew labor hours available until either running out of work orders or labor hours. The schedule is mostly a “soft schedule,” not specifying days and without assigning names for craftspersons to jobs. (The daily scheduling is a supervisor task as the week unfolds.) This list of work orders (the “schedule”) sets a mission in the mind of the supervisor of “trying to complete a certain amount of work, but being okay to break the schedule.” Schedule compliance between 40% and 90% confirms the scheduler has fully loaded the schedule. This mission results in best-practice craft wrench time of 55%. This above-average productivity allows completing the extra proactive work to achieve competitive edge production reliability.
Yet again, industry most commonly runs weekly scheduling as making a calendar identifying daily assignments a week in advance, as well as underloading the schedule to achieve high schedule compliance. The first problem with this approach is that making such advance daily schedules, especially with assignments, leads to unnecessary scheduler effort making the initial schedule as well as adjusting the schedule every day. This micromanagement also frustrates crew supervisors.
The second problem is that underloading the schedule to allow for break ins and thus have high schedule compliance leads to wrench time of only 35% because of Parkinson’s Law (i.e., the amount of work assigned expands to fill the time available). Most reactive jobs and many scheduled jobs take longer than necessary because normal wrench time is 35% (the point where humans feel busy). The underloaded schedule leads to a supervisor mission of “taking care of operations and otherwise making sure everyone has something to do.” We achieve high schedule compliance, but we fail in not being more productive to do the extra proactive work that leads to superior production reliability.
Managers steady the boat. Leaders rock the boat. Doing what everyone does gives us a good company making a profit, but only for now because increased competition is coming. They can duplicate what we do, the common way we do maintenance. But leaders make us go against the grain. We want to be a great company making a superior profit. We want to stifle competition because the others cannot easily duplicate what we do, the way we do maintenance. Leaders look for that competitive edge.
Rock the boat. Consider pointing your planning and scheduling toward the rare waters that improve both execution quality and craft productivity. Run planning as a Deming Cycle and scheduling as fully loaded weekly buckets to defeat Parkinson’s Law. Don’t settle for good. Be great!
