Effective planning, schedule and work management reporting cannot be understated in a world where equipment uptime is paramount to any operation. Unplanned downtime events are not welcome in any operation.

So how do we increase “uptime” and reduce “downtime”? Well, firstly you need to draw a line in the sand and start with the development of effective work management processes. These processes then determine the “who”, the “what” and the “when”, of course you then need to train your maintenance personnel in these processes and ensure they have the necessary documentation to understand how to use the CMMS to support these processes.

While most CMMS have the necessary functions to enable the Maintenance Planner to “plan” a work order, many systems do not have the capability to provide resource driven, work order scheduling capability nor the ability to provide concise, easily accessible work order completion history complete with failure analysis and cost.

Why do I need to schedule my work?

Having the ability to schedule your work against known resources for a known department within an agreed utilisation and timeframe, will increase the ability of the scheduler to effectively use the resources he has available to complete an amount of work in the required timeframe. 

What are the benefits of effective scheduling?

Work Management should be driven by a continuous improvement loop, and one of those drivers is to be able to schedule work effectively and then to be able to report on the schedule completion. Work completion should be presented not only in the amount of scheduled work completed, but also, break-in and breakdown work also completed within this timeframe. 

What base reports should I be using to manage my work effort?

Having the ability clearly access scheduling and work completion achievements can drive a continuous improvement process whereby the operation sets targets for key performance indicators such as:

Schedule Loading

A measure which indicates the amount of estimated labour hours attributed to work orders scheduled for a known period, against those labour hours available by “Responsibility” (Department).

Maintaining an agreed schedule loading % will ensure that labour resources are effectively managed and engaged in maintaining the plant. Tied with the Schedule Completion metric, a low schedule completion achievement may well indicate over scheduling of resources against those available. This in turn can show either that the estimated hours of planned work are “underestimated” or that there is too much unplanned “break-in work” occurring.

Schedule Completion

A measure which indicates the percentage of scheduled jobs that were completed in the reporting period. A low schedule completion count can be attributed to too much break in work, (low schedule work ratio) or ineffective planning of the work scheduled for the period or over scheduling of the resources available to complete the work in the period nominated.

This metrics is used to monitor both the effectiveness of the scheduling process (to ensure that the work scheduled is sufficiently planned and scheduled with the correct resources) and that the work is effectively executed as per the scheduled plan

Schedule Work Ratio

Is a measure of maintenance effectiveness indicating effective work identification and planning of resources, parts, materials, and equipment for each job on the weekly schedule. 

The driver behind this metric is to move maintenance activities into a planned, predictive space with the aim of increasing plant reliability and predictability.  This has a positive impact on safety, cost of maintenance and equipment utilisation.

PM Completion

Preventative and Condition based tasks should be a completion priority to any maintenance department. 

The PM Completion report indicates the percentage of Preventative / Predictive scheduled work orders completed in a period against all Preventative / Predictive work orders scheduled in the same period.

Preventative / Predictive works are designed to address failure modes, that is to identify / rectify faults before bringing the machine down in an unplanned nature. The higher the PM Completion rate the less chance of machine failure, the lower the PM Completion rate the more chance of lower machine availability and a decrease in MTBF.

Does SWM have the capability to support effective work management?

Schedule Work Mate has been built by maintenance people for maintenance people.

Specifically for those users of PRONTO Xi software, SWM with its base modules including Quality Metrics, Scheduler, Supervisors Workbench and Report modules can provide you with functionality to support your journey of effective work management.

Want to see or hear more, then contact us today!