At what frequency do you calculate the schedule compliance metric? Is it weekly, daily, or hourly? Depending on who you ask, you might come up with a different answer. For me, it depends on several factors. The first one is the level of Maintenance organization reactivity. That is followed by how long the organization has been producing next week’s schedule. It might surprise you but a number of organizations still don’t produce a formal schedule for next week. Another factor is the partnership between Maintenance and Operations.
It can also depend on whether you are using a “bucket” approach to next week’s schedule or have lined out each day and hour the week prior as part of your scheduling approach. Another is how much of the available labor hours are you scheduling. Some organizations only schedule 50% of their available labor due to reactive levels. There are others as well.
Consider what we are trying to address first. We really want to produce a schedule and understand how well we are doing in meeting the schedule. While it’s OK to break the schedule for real emergencies to drive productivity, we need to understand why the schedule breaks are required and eliminate those hopefully from reoccurring. We are striving to complete all of the scheduled work during the course of the week. To accomplish this, we use the Schedule Compliance metric.
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From a continuous improvement perspective, I’m OK starting out calculating the metric by week provided the schedule contains corrective actions and preventive maintenance tasks. Yes, I see some organizations that either produce no schedule or a schedule with PM’s only. If we are consistently getting metric results by week of 60-70% or higher, I move to calculating by day and begin to push for to improve those daily numbers. This also assumes we are scheduling 100% of the available hours too. There might be a need for calculating Schedule Compliance by day sooner or even by hour potentially in the case of shutdowns or outages. That said, when managing shutdowns and outages; the focus is not looking backward but looking ahead for critical path items and such.
Remember the goal is continuous improvement. What are your thoughts?
Cheers, Jeff Shiver