100% Scheduling Case Study

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100% Scheduling at Bunge

Case Study on How Full Scheduling Improves Work Practices

Brian J. Dietsch, Maintenance & Reliability Director, Bunge North America

Abstract

This paper provides insight to how scheduling a batch of weekly work that matches the available

weekly crew capacity increases work productivity. Many companies typically schedule only a

percentage of available crew capacity because they know urgent or emergency work will break

the schedule anyways. However, the main purpose of weekly scheduling is to set a realistic goal

and not pull off a perfect maintenance work schedule

The following key question is addressed: How does 100% scheduling improve work practices?

The history of maintenance work order scheduling at Bunge North America started with detailed

and complex weekly schedules that most found to be of little value. The time to complete these

schedules and the many variables that caused daily changes, resulted in employees not wanting

to perform this function. Maintenance work order practices suffered as a result. By modifying

the scheduling to a goal setting activity and introducing simple to use tools, weekly scheduling

has become common practice and has also highlighted the need to adhere to standard

maintenance work flows. This paper details the need for proper work practices in order for

scheduling to be successful.

This paper also addresses many concerns about partial scheduling, operations management

involvement, scheduling metrics, the need for adequate planning, backlog management,

improved maintenance work performance and key lessons learned.

Scheduling Goals

Manufacturing plants exist to make a profit for the company and shareholders. This only occurs

when the facility has available and reliable production capacity. Therefore, the end goal of

planning and scheduling is to improve asset reliability and increase equipment availability. This

is done by reducing reactive breakdown work and increase proactive work designed to identify

potential problems. We must either add more resources for this proactive work or become more

efficient with the resources currently available. Planning and 100% scheduling is a maintenance

management tool that allows us to reach this goal without adding additional workforce or

overtime.

100% Scheduling, Why We Do It

So why do we want 100% scheduling instead of 50% or 80%? Certainly there will be requested

work that will break the best laid plans and schedules. Shouldnt we just accept this and build in

that 20% reactive work factor? The key to increasing maintenance productivity is to start each

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week with a batch of work that matches the crew capacity. This simple goal setting exercise and

subsequent follow up with a full daily schedule results in increased productivity. If we schedule

less than 100%, we acquiesce to the belief that maintenance is here to take care of operations and

any time left is reserved to work on the backlog. That extra 20% in the schedule may not seem

like much, but scheduling 100% sends the clear message that maintenance does indeed have a

full schedule of work next week that we want to accomplish. True emergencies will still be

taken care of, but we are trying to break the cycle of viewing maintenance simply being there to

serve operations. This mindset must change for maintenance to have an opportunity to improve

productivity.

For a maintenance supervisor or manager who builds the daily schedule, why sort through all

work orders every day when they already have a select group of work orders in the weekly

schedule list to choose from. Not only does it make it much easier for the supervisor to build the

daily schedule, it concentrates on work that operations has already agreed that it wants done.

Having an agreed upon weekly list of work also saves time of searching through all work orders

and deciding which ones to work on. This allows the supervisor more time to concentrate on his

core function, managing the work crews.

From a metrics standpoint, a 100% schedule sets a common baseline for all plants. Its very easy

to achieve a high level of schedule compliance when only 50% of the jobs are scheduled! High

schedule compliance is not the goal. Getting more work done with the same resources is the

primary goal.

100% Scheduling, What is Needed?

Ready Backlog

The first requirement to build a 100% schedule is an adequate backlog of planned work

orders. For scheduling purposes, each work order and job plan must include to following

information: priority, created date, functional location or equipment number, detailed job

description, type of craft, number of craftsmen, estimates hours, physical location, and a

work order status of Waiting Scheduling or Waiting Plant Conditions. This information

provides the weekly scheduling tool necessary data for sorting and calculating remaining

crew availability.

Tools

There are many weekly and daily scheduling tools on the market. Bunge chose to keep the

tools as simple as possible but yet capable of performing the intended tasks. Instead of

scheduling directly in SAP, Excel was chosen as the scheduling tool. Planned work waiting

scheduling is simply imported into the weekly scheduling tool and sorted by priority, age and

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like equipment. The tool also provides very visual indications of % scheduled hours and

available hours per craft. This simplicity allows planners to quickly master the scheduling

principles instead of trying to learn and master a more complex software program.

The daily scheduling tool is built directly into the weekly spreadsheet. Supervisors select the

day of the week and employees who will be assigned to each work order. They then filter by

day of the week to quickly see the daily schedule. By keeping the list of available work in an

easy to use format, supervisors spend less time on the computer and more time in the plant

managing the crews.

People

The final and most important piece of 100% scheduling is the people. Starting with each

maintenance craft, known available hours are added to the crew capacity for following week.

Vacation days, training sessions, meetings, safety tool box talks and any other time not

available to work on a job are subtracted from the crew capacity.

In addition to continuously improving job plans and planning work orders, the planner also

builds the proposed weekly schedule. By planning the jobs, they already have a sense of

when the work will be done and use this knowledge when they build the weekly schedule.

While the scheduling tool does an automatic sort, it will put low priority jobs high on the list

if a high priority job exists on the same equipment. It may or may not make sense to do both

jobs simultaneously. By having knowledge on the jobs, the planner can prescreen the weekly

schedule before it goes to operations for review.

The weekly scheduling meeting with Operations and Maintenance is critical to building the

formal pact between the two parties. A long drawn out meeting that reviews each work

order will quickly devolve in what many feel is a waste of their time. The following are

general requirements of the weekly scheduling meeting: is about 30 minutes in length, starts

with a review of the previous weeks schedule success, provides operations an opportunity to

modify the proposed schedule, allow operations to select specific days for certain work and

ends with the agreement that this is the list of work that we all want to get done next week.

Without this pact between maintenance and operations, the reactive culture will probably

remain since maintenance will be not viewed as having a stated goal of work to accomplish

The Plant Manager needs to set the expectation that a weekly schedule will be developed and

operations and maintenance will agree upon a 100% schedule. This one message is

instrumental to driving both parties to work together. Without it, scheduling and most other

work flows will not be sustained.

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What We Measure

With any good program, there are metrics to gauge performance and provide feedback. The

Bunge reliability program started with twenty one metrics that are reported each month by all

plants. Two scheduling metrics in particular are not reported but instead used only at the plant

during the weekly scheduling meeting. These two metrics are: % Schedule Success per week,

and % Scheduled Hours per week. So why are these two metrics not reported to corporate? A

management decision was made that we did not want to compare schedule success across all

plants since the acceptable range is very large (40% to 90%). Many factors affect schedule

success and we did not see the value in analyzing this metric across twenty seven plants. What is

more important, is that the weekly planning meeting start off with a review of this metric and

discuss if management needs to address any concerns that may have prevented maintenance form

achieving an acceptable schedule success. The other metric not reported is % Scheduled Hours

per week. We have found that this is the key to the weekly scheduling that there is no need to

report it. It is a given that it will be 100% plus or minus a point or two.

The monthly metrics that are reported each month focus on the end results of proper planning

and scheduling. These end result metrics include: number of completed work orders, % of

emergency & urgent work orders (defects), % planned work, number of job plans created and

number of job plans modified. Since the goal is to increase maintenance productivity, the best

metric to monitor is number of completed work orders. The % planned work and % or

emergency and urgent work orders give a good view of how reactive or proactive the work

environment is. The number of job plans created and modified provides feedback on how well

the continuous cycle of improving job plans is working.

Work Flow Improvements

Planning and Scheduling in the middle of the work order life cycle. From a notification to

closing the order, all work flows must function properly for planning and scheduling to be

successful. When the 100% weekly scheduling tool was introduced at the Bunge plants, several

things immediately became clear for the tool to work. The first requirement was an adequate

amount of ready backlog to completely fill a weekly schedule. There was usually plenty of total

backlog so the planners had to ensure that work orders received proper information for the

scheduling tool to work. While reviewing the total backlog, many plants realized that there were

many obsolete or duplicate work orders in the system that needed to be cleaned out. The backlog

cleanup at the Bellevue plant quickly removed over 200 work orders. See Figure 1.

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Figure #1: Bellevue Plant Reduction in Total Backlog once Scheduling Started

Once total backlog was addressed, new incoming work notification issues had to be resolved.

One problem several plants encountered was notifications written to high level functional

locations such as buildings or units. This was done as a matter of expediency for the notifier.

Since the scheduling tool groups work orders by like functional location, scheduling multiple

work orders to like equipment does not work well. If all work orders were written to the highest

level (the plant), there would be no sort capability at all. Sending this message back to the

notifiers has improved getting notification written to the equipment level or low level functional

locations. Again, the scheduling tool highlighted this problem so management could act to

resolve it.

After the work was complete, many work orders were not closed in a timely manner. At Bunge,

in order for a work order to be considered complete, it must contain the following items: an

attached task list, be technically closed in SAP, and have confirmed hours greater than zero.

Many duplicate or obsolete work orders were closed to get them out of the total backlog but do

not count as completed since no hours were recorded to them. By not closing the orders, they

would come up again in the available backlog. Planners and managers quickly realized that to

keep the scheduling process clean, the work order completion work flow must be followed in a

timely manner. As illustrated in Figure 2, the amount of work orders properly completed spiked

after the 100% scheduling was started in June/July 2013. The total backlog was quickly reduced

and then it became apparent that not enough planned jobs were available to fill the schedule.

During this same time, new predictive maintenance routes were developed and initiated. This

additional work filled the backlog and more work orders were again completed per month. The

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daily scheduling plays an instrumental role is continuously filling each craftsmans day with a

full load of work. Without the daily scheduling, the weekly scheduling does not provide the

productivity increase.

Figure 2: Increase in Cairo Plant work orders completed with spike in August after 100%

scheduling started

The remaining workflow that has shown improvement is emergency work. This by far is the

biggest obstacle to schedule success and moving towards a proactive culture. It is human nature

for supervisors to want problems quickly taken care of in their departments. However, this does

not mean that all work is an emergency and must be done today. By having production

supervisors participate in the weekly scheduling meeting and confirming what maintenance work

they want done next week, they now have a vested interest in protecting the weekly schedule.

Two plants in particular, Cairo and Morristown have demonstrated excellent reductions in

emergency and urgent work. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate how the reactive work culture can be

reduced over time.

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Figure 3: Reduction in Cairo Plant Emergency and Urgent Work Orders

Figure 4: Reduction in Morristown Plant Emergency and Urgent Work Orders

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Effective Change Management

Arguably the most difficult part of implementing a reliability program is culture change.

Without understanding the natural progression of change, a top down force to institute new work

practices is unlikely to be sustained without constant monitoring and enforcement. Bunge

employed several change management tools such as forward visioning, stakeholder analysis and

celebrating success. In addition to these tools, culture change surveys were taken to gauge

progress through the three distinct phases of change which are:

1) Adopting: This phase includes the initial learning and understanding what the changes are

and why the need for change

2) Mastering: During this phase, new skills are acquired and people learn to use new tools

and techniques

3) Exploiting: The final phase occurs when people realize the benefits and want the changes

to become routine

When 100% scheduling was introduced along with the new scheduling tool, the main focus was

explaining the benefits of 100% scheduling and describing how it works. Planners, maintenance

mangers, operations mangers and plant managers engaged in stakeholder analyses and discussed

what was important to each member. By listening to the employees needs and explaining what

the future benefits of the scheduling would bring, it was hoped that people would quickly get

through the Adopting phase. The Mastering phase included training and mentoring sessions

which used the weekly scheduling sheet and the weekly scheduling meeting format. SAP and

Excel technical support and on-site participation in the weekly scheduling meetings provided

quick feedback to those using the new work practices and tools. The tools were intentionally

built to be simple to use and easily expandable, therefore, plants quickly mastered the practices

and tools. The final phase of exploiting the new practices quickly followed as planners and

supervisors asked for more capability in the scheduling tool. These capabilities included a daily

scheduling tool, total backlog counter and additional data fields to sort work orders easier by

physical location, department, work order type, etc. Comments from a change agent and

maintenance planner include:

The 100% scheduling tool is very visual, easy to use, and is the vehicle we are using to drive

change. Scheduling doesn't work unless all other workflows are under good control.

Bill S., Reliability Manager

We've tried other planning and scheduling techniques but this one is easy to use and understand.

The scheduling tool allows us to quickly build the 100% proposed weekly schedule so that I can

distribute it prior to our weekly scheduling meeting.

Kevin H., Maintenance Planner

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There are many capable software and CMMS packages available to do weekly and daily

scheduling on the market and Bunge is open to looking at those options in the future. The choice

to perform 100% scheduling in Excel was based on a desire to facilitate a quick change process.

The focus was placed on learning the techniques and not new software.

Key Lessons Learned

Bunges first attempt at scheduling did not result in any benefits to the company or employees.

In fact, scheduling was looked down upon as burdensome and a waste of time. Looking back on

the process of implementing the scheduling work flow there are several key lessons learned:

Plant management must fully support the scheduling meeting and participate in the first

few meetings. This sends a strong message that the 100% weekly schedule is important

and that both maintenance and operations need to work together to produce this schedule.

Without the plant managers support, scheduling along with other maintenance work

flows will not likely be followed.

Concentrate first on the scheduling process and not complex computer programs. This

allows the change to be less burdensome and more likely to be adopted

Plant management must drive the message that not all work is an emergency just because

you want it done now. A high percentage of emergency and urgent work will undermine

the best developed schedule.

Scheduling 50% or 80% sends the message that maintenance always has time to care of

reactive work

Maintenance supervisors need to be free to build and manage daily schedules. This is one

of the supervisors core responsibilities. Keeping the daily schedules current requires the

supervisor to be in the field managing and following up on work progress. As work gets

done, additional work orders should be given to the craftsmen. This is the final key to

getting more done.

Operations play a critical role in the weekly and daily scheduling. Supervisors need to

feel that work orders will get completed in a timely manner, otherwise, they will set a high

priority on all work. This work breaks the schedule and continues the reactive culture.

The weekly scheduling meeting is a perfect forum to make sure the work they want done

in the following week is on the schedule.

Have metrics definitions in place before starting to collect data because definition changes

can make correlations and trends difficult to analyze. One example in particular is

number of completed work orders per month. Obsolete and duplicate work orders closed

out of the CMMS initially were counted as complete until requirements for confirmed

hours and an attached task list were included in the definition. The change was made at

the first day of the year to prevent skewing YTD metrics.

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It is important to quickly answer questions and support those trying to adopt the new work

practices. Frustration sets in and people will naturally want to revert back to old methods

if they do not feel support from those requesting the changes.

The final and most important message Bunge has emphasized to managers is that we are trying

to shift the culture..

FROM: Seeing maintenance as always taking care of operations needs while also having a

backlog of work to take care of when we get time

TO: Maintenance has a full schedule of work to get done every week. If operations have a true

emergency, maintenance will be there to take care of the problem, but not all scheduled work

will get done.

For this culture change to happen a plant manager must support the 100% Scheduling concepts

and both maintenance and operations staffs must work together as a team to build and follow the

schedule. The end result is improved maintenance productivity, increased asset reliability and

increased equipment availability.

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Keywords

Availability

Business Case

Change Management

Culture Change

Efficiency

Hours

Lessons Learned

Maintenance Management

Man Hours

Planning and scheduling

Proactive

Schedule

Scheduling

Work order

Wrench time

Work Management Track 5 100% Scheduling at Bunge - Case Study on

How Full Scheduling Improves Work Practices

Brian Dietsch Bunge North America

Doc Palmer Richard Palmer & Associates

Agenda

Bunge & Doc Palmer Brief Intro Scheduling Goals & Prerequisites 100% Scheduling Why & How we do it Planning & Scheduling KPIs Example Results Maintenance Workflow Improvements Employee Comments Effective Change Management Key Lessons learned Q & A

2

Bunge processes oilseeds, grains, sugarcane and other agricultural commodities to

make products and ingredients with numerous applications for customers worldwide.

What We Do Feeding and Fueling the World

Bunge What We Do

Doc Palmer

Even before retiring after a career of over 25 years as a

practitioner, Richard Doc Palmer began helping companies with their maintenance planning and scheduling efforts. Doc is

the author of McGraw-Hills best selling reliability book Maintenance Planning & Scheduling Handbook.

Doc provides consulting, education,

guidance, mentoring and training for

companies internationally for maintenance

planning success.

www.palmerplanning.com

Bunge Asset Reliability Overview

Bunge started its reliability program in late 2010

27 plants in North America

>100 plants worldwide

Started with: equipment lists, criticality ranking, FMEA, RCM, reliability strategy development, 5

core PdM technologies, 11 standard maintenance

workflows, 21 reliability metrics

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Available and Reliable Production Capacity

Encounter Less Reactive Work

Complete More Proactive Work

Planning and Scheduling

Generate Proactive Work Orders Increase Labor Productivity

Planning & Scheduling Goals

Doc Palmer

Planning & Scheduling Goals

Planning

Improves craftsmen efficiency by institutionalizing knowledge

Scheduling

Gets more work done with a given amount of resources

Combined goal is to increase available production capacity

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Scheduling Prerequisites Adequate Ready Backlog

Planned Work Orders with the following info

Type of Craftsmen

Number of Craftsmen

Estimated Hours

Reusable, ever improving Task List

Job Location (Equipment #, physical location, etc)

Work Order status

WSCH: Waiting Scheduling

WPCN: Waiting Plant Conditions 8

Scheduling Prerequisites - Tools

Weekly scheduling tool

Daily scheduling tool

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Scheduling Prerequisites - People

Known work hours for each craftsman

Planner builds proposed weekly schedule

Operations and Maintenance managers & supervisors to review proposed weekly schedule

Plant Manager to set the expectation that a weekly schedule will be developed and operations and

maintenance will agree upon a 100% schedule

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100% Scheduling Why We Do It

Used to set a realistic weekly goal

Gives the maintenance team a list of work to try and accomplish. Without a list of work, teams

tend to just take care of operations and get to

some of the backlog.

Sets a formal pact between operations and maintenance. Just like operations already does,

maintenance now has a schedule.

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Sets a common baseline across all plants

Its easy to have 100% schedule compliance when you only schedule 50% of your

workforce!

Makes it easy for the maintenance supervisor to identify work orders to put on the daily

schedules.......they are already in the weekly

schedule list of work orders

By concentrating on the weekly list of work orders, more work gets done

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Avoids Wrench Time studies and metrics that can be seen as Big Brother is watching us

Provides an opportunity for operations to participate in what work gets done during the

following week

Helps reduce emergency and urgent priority work orders so that maintenance can concentrate on

planned and scheduled work

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100% Scheduling How We Do It

Start with known crew capacity segregated by craft

Sort planned work orders by:

Highest priority first

Oldest work orders first

Regroups by identical functional location

Schedule each craft so that planned work order hours equals crew capacity

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100% Scheduling How We Do It

Planner reviews the schedule and modifies scheduled status based on any known information about the equipment availability

Weekly scheduling meeting with operations and maintenance confirms the maintenance work schedule

Maintenance supervisor then builds daily work schedule.again, 100% of crew capacity for the day is matched to planned work orders

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Weekly Schedule Notes

Known jobs are scheduled for certain days

Separate weekly schedules can be made for:

Off shifts

Multiple maintenance crews across a large plant

Large project work

Shutdowns / Turnarounds

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Daily Schedule Notes

Daily schedule built by the end of each work day

Adjusted based upon work progress, equipment availability, emergency work, etc.

Maintenance supervisor must be free to build and manage this daily schedule

Key to productivity improvement is to keep the craftsmen busy with work orders from the list

of weekly work

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Scheduling KPIs

% Schedule Success per week

% Scheduled Hours per week

Planning and Scheduling KPIs

% planned work per month (Bunge defines this as a closed work order with greater than 0 hours time

confirmed to it and having an attached task list)

Number of new Job Plans Created per month

Number of new Job Plans Modified per month

% of Emergency & Urgent (defects) work orders per month

Number of work orders completed per month

Number of active work orders in backlog

Example Results Atchison Plant

Planning &

Scheduling started

in February, became

routine in March,

and lowered our

urgent work

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Number of completed

work orders jumped as

scheduling started to

work. Ready backlog

dropped as total backlog

was reduced

Example Results Atchison Plant

Planning metrics are

showing consistent

improvement. Our

goal is to have >80%

planned work

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Number of created and

modified job plans

indicate how well the

continuous improvement

cycle is working

Example Results Bellevue Plant

Total work order backlog decreased due to initial

backlog cleanup and 100% Scheduling

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Example Results Cairo Plant

Small plant making rapid progress and has strict control of work flows

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Example Results Danville Plant

Very large plant making slow but steady progress

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Workflow Improvements

100% scheduling is a management tool. It highlights poor work practices such as:

Inadequate screening

Releasing and printing work orders before planning

Not enough ready backlog

Not closing work orders in a timely manner

Not recording time to closed work orders

High % of reactive work that breaks the weekly schedule

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Workflow Improvements

Planning & Scheduling Metrics Identify

Poor or insufficient planning

Not creating or modifying job plans with technicians feedback

Not giving craftsmen enough work on a daily basis

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Employee comments

We are trying to keep our maintenance labor costs down by better utilizing our maintenance

crews and coordinating jobs with operations. This

is exactly the tool that helps us do that and I fully

support it. YTD 2014 vs YTD 2013 maintenance

labor costs are down over $45,000 and

maintenance hours are down over 2,100 hours.

We are definitely seeing value in scheduling work.

John G.

Plant Manager 27

Employee comments

We've tried other planning and scheduling techniques but this one is easy to use and

understand. The scheduling tool allows us to

quickly build the 100% proposed weekly schedule

so that I can distribute it prior to our weekly

scheduling meeting.

Kevin H.

Maintenance Planner

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Employee comments

The 100% scheduling tool is very visual, easy to use, and is the vehicle we are using to drive

change. Scheduling doesn't work unless all other

workflows are under good control.

Bill S.

Reliability Manager

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If you just force people to use new tools and techniques, dont expect to sustain the changes

The 3 main phases of cultural change are:

1. Understanding what the changes are and why

we need to change

2. Making the new practices routine

3. Exploiting the benefits of the new practices

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At Bunge, we concentrated on change management using different tools

Forward visioning

Explaining the benefits of the new work practices

Celebrate and communicate successes

Provide SAP and Excel support

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Once people see the benefit and get to enjoy the benefits of the improved work practices, it

becomes self-sustaining and they will move into

the exploiting stage

Most plants have modified the weekly scheduling sheet to fit their desires and

incorporated additional capabilitiesthe exploiting stage

We know other solutions are available, but for now we concentrated on learning the techniques

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Key Lessons Learned

Concentrate first on the scheduling process and not complex computer programs

Simple tools that work will quickly be adopted

Plant management must drive the message that not all work is an emergency just because you want it done now

The idea that Maintenance has a schedule but will still assist Operations in emergencies is key to changing a reactive culture to proactive

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Key Lessons Learned

If you only schedule 50% or 80% because you know reactive work will happen, you do not set a

realistic goal

You wont get any more work done unless supervisors are free to build and manage daily

schedules keep the guys busy!

Once operations buys in, reactive work will drop because they have confidence that lower priority

work will be completed in a reasonable time

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Key Lessons Learned

Have metrics definitions in place before starting to collect data..changes midstream make correlations difficult.

Quickly answer questions and support those trying to adopt the new work practices

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Key Lessons Learned

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The key message Bunge has emphasized to

managers is that we are trying to shift the

culture.

FROM: Seeing maintenance as always taking care

of operations needs while also having a backlog of

work to take care of when we get time

TO: Maintenance has a full schedule of work to get

done every week. If operations has a true

emergency, maintenance will be there to take care of

the problem, but not all scheduled work will get

done.

Questions & Answers

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Brian Dietsch [email protected] Doc Palmer [email protected]

Documents

100% Scheduling Case Study