44% Schedule Compliance with a Planner Who Also Supervises
A 24-person maintenance department supports a single high-volume assembly plant running three shifts. One planner also supervises the mechanical crew. The weekly schedule is published Thursday for the following week, but schedule compliance averages 44%. Emergency and reactive work consumes 38% of available craft hours. The backlog is nine weeks at current staffing against a target of four. A wrench-time study shows 52% of craft hours are hands-on tools; the largest losses are waiting for parts (18%) and waiting for instructions or permits (11%). The storeroom reports an average 4.2 hours to fill a part request because two of three stock clerks work day shift only. Supervisors say they are too busy to plan and that the schedule is fiction by Tuesday. Production complains about slow response to breakdowns and has begun keeping its own list of "favors" with individual technicians. Overtime is 11%.
1. Sequence the corrective actions. What do you fix first, second, and third, and what impact do you expect at each step?
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The numbers describe a chain, not a list: the planner has no time to plan, so jobs are not kitted or specified, so craft wait for parts and instructions, so the schedule slips, so production loses faith and goes around it with favours, so reactive work grows and the planner has even less time. Break the loop at the cheapest link first.
1. Protect the schedule (weeks 1–3). Agree with production a written definition of a genuine emergency versus a priority change, and load the weekly schedule at 80–85% of available hours, holding the remainder for emergent work. A schedule loaded to 100% always fails. Impact: compliance is measured against a frozen schedule that is achievable, so the 44% number starts to mean something.
2. Kit the work (weeks 2–6). The planner checks parts and permits at planning, and everything on next week's schedule is staged by Wednesday. This attacks the 18% waiting-for-parts loss directly and is the fastest wrench-time gain available.
3. Free the planner (weeks 4–8). Removing supervision duty is the single highest-leverage structural change; a planner doing both typically plans in whatever time is left after firefighting.
4. Then job plans (weeks 6–12). Write plans for the top 20 jobs by annual hours; do not attempt the whole backlog.
5. Then storeroom coverage. Extend a clerk to cover the overlap shift or appoint a parts runner; 4.2 hours to fill a request is indefensible.
Expected trajectory: compliance 44% to about 70% by month three, wrench time 52% to about 62%, reactive 38% to about 25–28% by month six.
2. Make the case for and against separating the planner role from the supervisor role, and state the decision criteria you would use.
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For separation:
- Planning is analytical work done ahead of time; supervising is real-time work done now. They compete for the same hours, and the emergency always wins.
- The role carries a conflict of interest: the person who schedules the work also judges whether the crew can finish it, which encourages optimistic commitments and then silent re-prioritisation.
- Measurement breaks down. If compliance is poor, you cannot tell whether the plan was bad or the execution was bad, because the same person owns both.
- Craft see the schedule as negotiable when the person who wrote it is also the person who can excuse them from it.
Against separation:
- In a 24-person department, headcount is tight and the supervisor genuinely knows the equipment and the crew.
- A full-time planner needs enough work to plan. If the planned-to-unplanned ratio is low, a dedicated planner can be under-loaded.
- Splitting the role adds a coordination interface and can slow decisions.
Decision criteria I would apply:
- Number of craft and number of distinct work groups: above roughly 15–20 craft, dedicated planning pays for itself within a quarter.
- Reactive share: at 38%, there is more than enough unplanned work to justify a planner who is converting it into planned work.
- Presence of a suitable alternative: a chargehand or working lead can absorb the supervisory duties, which is usually cheaper than a new hire.
Recommendation: separate the roles, backfill supervision with a working lead, and run a six-month trial judged on schedule compliance, planned work percentage, and wrench time. If compliance does not move, revisit.
3. Define the KPI set you would put in front of the plant manager, including leading and lagging measures, six-month targets, and the ways these measures can be gamed.
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Leading indicators (controllable this week)
- Schedule compliance against the frozen weekly schedule: 44% to 75%. Gaming risk: cherry-picking easy jobs. Counter by weighting compliance by craft hours, not job count, and reporting schedule loading alongside it (target 80–85%).
- Planned work percentage (planned versus total work orders): target 75%+. Gaming risk: labelling reactive jobs as "planned." Counter with an audit of a random sample each month.
- Kitting rate at schedule issue: target 90%. Hard to fake if the storeroom signature is required.
- Wrench time from periodic sampling: 52% to 62%.
- Backlog in craft-weeks: 9 to 5. Gaming risk: closing work orders without doing the work. Counter with a PM and work-order audit.
- Planner time actually spent planning: target 70% of the planner's hours.
Lagging indicators (outcomes)
- Reactive/emergency hours as a percentage of total: 38% to 25%.
- Overtime: 11% to 6%.
- Asset availability and MTBF on the top ten critical assets.
- Maintenance cost per unit produced.
Framing for the plant manager. Lead with two numbers only: reactive percentage and schedule compliance, with the dollar value of the wrench-time gap beside them. Then explain the rule: compliance is never to be improved by loading more work into the schedule or by shortening job scopes.