The situation we are usually called into
The operator employs experienced planners and schedulers. The weekly schedule is published, and by Wednesday it bears little resemblance to what the crews are doing.
The mechanism is broken in three identifiable places. Planning and scheduling are conflated — the same person prepares job plans (scope, parts, tools, permits, procedures) and sequences work against resources. Under pressure the sequencing wins, because the schedule has a deadline. Job plans degrade into work-order titles, and crews arrive to discover they need something they do not have. The schedule is a forecast, not a commitment — work is added mid-week by anyone with sufficient standing, and because the schedule is routinely broken, nobody plans against it, which makes breaking it costless. And wrench time is unmeasured, so the argument for fixing any of this cannot be made.
- Typical wrench time is 18–35%; world-class is 55–65%. The gap is the single largest recoverable productivity opportunity in most maintenance organisations.
- World-class maintenance schedule compliance is above 90%; planned maintenance work above 90%.
- It is not uncommon for a planned and scheduled job to be 25% or more effective than the same job executed without planning.
- Moving a team from ~35% to ~55% wrench time yields the output of a substantially larger workforce — without hiring anyone.
The real problem: you already own the capacity
Craft hours are consumed waiting for parts, permits, isolation and instruction. That waiting is maintenance capacity the organisation is already paying for. Planning does not create resource; it stops the resource being spent on waiting.
How we run the programme
Separate the two roles
Planning removes obstacles before the job. Scheduling allocates ready work to available resources. Different work, different rhythm, different person.
Job plans that survive contact
Scope, estimated hours, parts staged, tools identified, permits pre-arranged, procedure attached — the definition of a job that is ready to schedule.
A weekly cycle with a freeze point
A defined day on which next week’s schedule is agreed with operations and closed. Additions after the freeze require a named authority and are recorded as breaks.
Backlog discipline
Work that is not ready is not scheduled. A ready backlog of sufficient depth is what makes a schedule possible at all.
Measure wrench time and schedule breaks by reason
Which converts an argument into a dataset — and makes the improvement visible to the people funding it.
What makes it survive the next budget cycle
What the client is left with
Maintenance capacity they already owned, recovered from waiting; a schedule that operations has committed to; and a defensible answer to the question every plant manager eventually asks — why do we need more technicians?