Measure and Control Scheduling

Schedule compliance is one of the lagging key performance indicators used to assist crew supervisors in measuring and controlling scheduling. Schedule compliance is defined as the number of scheduled work orders that have been completed within a week period.

This article demonstrates the importance of the schedule compliance in the asset management and reliability world. Since every organization has its unique requirements, this article is intended for general use only. Please contact our professional services for demo and implementation of this and other crucial asset management and reliability leading and lagging KPIs.

Planning and Scheduling:

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In the asset management and reliability world, the planning process is a never-ending improvement cycle where planners continuously update work plans with what went wrong after work completion.  On the other hand, scheduling success is the measure of adherence to a one week schedule and its effectiveness.

While over-scheduling and under-scheduling against available labor hours have their own advantages and disadvantages, one of the important scheduling principles is to fully load the schedule to 100% of available hours with a preference given to scheduling higher priority work by under-utilizing available skill levels over lower priority work.

While wrench time is considered the best measure of schedule performance, schedule compliance is the ultimate measure of proactive maintenance and an indicator of the level of control of the maintenance crew over a plant.

A reactive plant environment has more chances to break the weekly schedule while a proactive maintenance force, that is in control of its equipment, has less chances of emergency situations that will most likely interrupt the weekly schedule. Schedule compliance facilitates the discussion with other teams and provides a form of accountability. A crew supervisor utilizes the schedule compliance to understand the reason behind a high or a low schedule compliance percentage.

Low and High Schedule Compliance Percentage:

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A low schedule compliance percentage, below 40% is an opportunity for improvement and usually is the result of one or more of the following facts:

• A high number of reactive, unexpected or emergency work
• Problems with storeroom performance
• Crew ignoring the schedule
• Unrealistic schedule created by the planning team
• Other unexpected circumstances beyond the supervisor’s control

The schedule compliance is therefore an important measure for improvement. For example, it can be used to measure how successful is the newly introduced solution to reduce the number of reactive work orders by the asset management and reliability team.

A high schedule compliance, higher than 90%, usually means that the planning group did not put enough work in the schedule to defeat Parkinson’s law: The insufficient amount of work still will take the entire period of crew availability. Also, a high schedule compliance cannot be justified with a high number of emergency work.

Finally, it is important to note that management should not push for a high schedule compliance where crew supervisor may break the schedule when appropriate.

Maximo KPI

The schedule compliance can be configured in Maximo using the KPI manager and crontask applications. The KPI needs to be scheduled to run every Sunday (or before the next weekly schedule as preferred) to calculate the ratio of completed over scheduled work orders within a week period.

References:
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook By Doc Palmer.
Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices By Ramesh Gulati.