This process handles the scheduling of a heavy maintenance visit. Scheduling a maintenance visit allows planners and floor managers to assign tasks to resources for execution so as to ensure the optimum usage of resources, and to ensure that required dates can be achieved.
Scheduling varies in difficulty from the simple where a glance at a planning board is sufficient to arrange the day's work to the complex where a set of dynamically interacting constraints control how various events can be scheduled. Complex scheduling requires the manipulation of tentative information and structures, not only are planners unsure when things will happen but they are often also unsure if they would happen and if not what the cause is or what the effect would be.
Scheduling allows managers or team leaders to schedule the contents of the maintenance visit based on the current information available in terms of resources, facility capacity, facility constraints, physical access constraints and material availability. Detail scheduling uses relationships, set during the planning phase to ensure that a visit can be executed efficiently. A Gantt chart provides good visibility to work progress as well as support for recording work scope changes identified during execution. Material can be pegged and reserved throughout the process to ensure material requirements are in place when required. As progress is recorded against the various work orders or work order operations, monitoring of status progress is displayed as bars in the Gantt chart thereby allowing managers to graphically monitor the real progress of work.
Following are some benefits provided by the capabilities within the Schedule Maintenance Visit process:
Due to the complex nature of heavy maintenance visits, work content is often allocated to team or work leaders to effectively control and manage the completion of tasks. Often these work leaders are required to arrange the contents of the visit structure due to unforeseen circumstances, aspects which could not have being borne in mind during the planning phase. This could be, for instance, the unavailability of resources (persons and tools/equipments), unexpected emergent work or non routines, all which could affect the scheduling of the work package. Team leaders are provided with the ability to: