Measure and Control Planning

Planned coverage is one of the leading key performance indicators used to assist supervisors in measuring and controlling the planning process. Planned coverage per month is defined as the percentage of completed work orders covered by a job plan over the total number of completed work orders within a month period.

This article demonstrates the importance of the percent planned coverage per month 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.

What is a Planned Job?

Some plants define a planned job as a development of a job’s scope by having all labors, skills required, estimated labor time, materials, kitted parts, tools, work sequence, safety requirements such a new labor could complete the work. This definition implies perfection and causes frustration in the industry where planners are expected to build a perfect job plan.

While plans will never be perfect, planners are expected to stop the organization’s knowledge drain by using their expertise and judgement to clearly define more of the correct parts, skills and more steps suitable for new labors to effectively and efficiently complete their work. Planners are also expected to continuously improve their plans by incorporating the feedback after work completion.

Symptoms of Ineffective Planning

An ineffective planning process has one or more of the following symptoms:

• Planners, not job plans, are expediting the work and/or parts
• Trend of high number of hours spent on unplanned work 
• Planners continuously extend support to technicians instead of focusing on future work
• High inventory stockout
• High production downtime

Enhancing Planning Capabilities

The planning process and capabilities can be enhanced by adopting the following practices and principles:

• Clearly identify the roles and responsibilities of planners and crew members
• Ensure that planners are focusing on future work that has not yet begun and are organized in a separate groups reporting to an independent leader
• Plan estimates should be based on filed information, planner’s judgement and expertise. Planners are usually chosen among the best craftspersons. The quality of plans depends on choosing the right person to be a planner
• Planners must have the right library of information and component level files including the equipment manuals, drawings, specifications and specific equipment manufacturer manuals
• Plans should first focus on “what” needs to be done then on “how” things should be done respecting and leaving known details to crafts skill

Planned Coverage Per Month:

Planned coverage per month is one of the top 5 key performance indicators used to proactively control the planning process. It is calculated as the percentage of actual work completed that had a job plan within a month period. A variant of this KPI can be calculated on weekly basis.

The purpose of this KPI is to ensure that reusable job plans are created to allow the continuous improvement cycle and to provide labor estimates for the scheduling process. Therefore a job plan does not need to be perfect and will be improved based on the feedback after work completion. From CMMS perspectives, it can be defined as a job plan package attached to a work order or a work order with a positive number of estimated labor hours.  

As per the industry standards, the preferred target of the planned coverage per month is suggested at 80% or above.

Maximo KPI

The planned coverage per month can be configured in Maximo using the KPI manager and crontask applications. The KPI needs to be scheduled to run at the end of every month to calculate the ratio of completed work orders that had a job plan within a month period.

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