I'm curious what others are doing to schedule maintenance craftsmen work on a daily basis. We currently create weekly schedules consisting of hundreds of PM/PdM/planned work orders for groups of craftsmen varying in size from 10 - 20 from 7i. We need to fully load our individual craftsmen based on craft and available time. We currently utilize a macro intensive excel worksheet to accomplish this, but lose the transfer of data back to 7i. MSProject is cumbersome when dealing with hundreds of small 30min to 4 hour jobs. Am I missing something in 7i, or has anyone else found any tools to accomplish this necessary task.

Some questions:
1) What type of plant it is?
2) How many craftsmen?
3) Why use ms project for day-to-day activities?
4) Do you have a centralized planning dept?

We use MS-project only for special jobs, like shutdowns, turnarounds and difficult jobs with multiple crafts and close coordination/monitoring needed.

It doesn't make sense to make "grease motorbearings" a re-occuring task in MS-project.

Also we have our "magnetic" planboards on the wall indicating the equipment and PM events for the whole year.

Last but not least, all "registered" equipment is assigned to a MRC (maintenance responsibility center). We have used the dept field to identify the mrc's
MRC's are:

• mechanical maintenance (welders, IC engines mechanics, all-rounders, fitters)
  
• electrical/instrumentation
  
• rotating equipment (pump mechanics etc..)
  

To resume, every equipment has a default group/section/dept which is taking care of it.

Of course if it is a piping job on a control valve (instrumentation) it can be assigned to the appropriate MRC

Every MRC has a team leader, whose responsibility is to distribute the workload.

Send out the workorders to the MRC's and keep track when they are reported finished. If the planner also have to run behind the daily attendence, when will he have time to work?

quote:

We need to fully load our individual craftsmen based on craft and available time

.. that is the teamleader's (front-line supervisor or whatever) job.

Thank you for your response - here's a little more information.
1) We’re primarily a discrete processing operation (food products)
2) 130 craftsmen
3) We don’t currently use MS Project for maintenance scheduling (only large project management) – but 7i has functionality to integrate and was at one time suggested by Datastream for this purpose
4) We have planners (4) assigned to groups of craftsman & maintenance supervisors by area of the plant
5) Our maintenance supervisors have the responsibility of assigning work to craftsman and assuring that is completed

My concern is keeping organized while job loading individual craftsmen on a daily basis. We strive to schedule eight hours of work for each craftsman including setups, changeovers, PMs, and planned work. This ends up being a couple thousand work orders a month scheduled by our supervising group. Based on daily plant operations, there is a lot of juggling of the schedules and we’re looking for a tool to help manage this process. Our current tool takes our weekly schedule and allows assignment of work to craftsman on a daily basis. It then totals hours assigned by craftsman, by day, taking into account work schedules. We manipulate this schedule on a daily basis, and then print and packet work orders assigned. The system also calculates basic metrics such as WO completion rates, job loading, etc. It's a great tool, but the main problem is that date changes, craftsman assignments, work order completion, etc. doesn't transfer back into Datastream7i where the data needs to reside. This results is duplication of a lot of work - such as completing work orders.

quote:

but 7i has functionality to integrate and was at one time suggested by Datastream for this purpose

Of course it does but it is a one way street, we have abandoned it long time ago. MS project is for the detail (time) planning to keep track of things, so incompatible ativities are not executed at the same time.

quote:

We strive to schedule eight hours of work for each craftsman

hm.. industry average is 2 hours out of 8. High numbers are only achieved during special interventions with lots of bosses wandering around, normally high stress peak periods.

quote:

It's a great tool, .... doesn't transfer back into Datastream7i where the data needs to reside.

If all the data is in DataStream, why don't use the tool to get it out and report it? The easiest thing in Datastream to do is to export to excel, and make some nice graphs about how things are going
That way you can improve your business, is their some fight going on between the "computer/office clan" and the "grease monkeys"?

Let me clarify a bit with an example. Let’s say, I’ve got 400 work orders on this weeks schedule including equipment setup, changeovers, PMs, and planned work. I need to manipulate these work orders, target dates and craftsman that are assigned the work, daily based on production scheduling and work priorities. These decisions are made between the maintenance group and production supervision. At the same time I need to look at how each craftsman is job loaded. Each day as work is completed, the work orders left on the schedule are considered for assignment. If there are not enough jobs on the schedule, we pull from a larger ‘ready to schedule’ backlog.
Changing work order target dates and assigned to’s while watching scheduled vs. available hours is a cumbersome task when dealing with this quantity of work orders daily. We want the data to reside in Datastream so we can look at metrics like schedule completion rates, MTBF, estimates vs. actuals, etc. We’re currently using Datastream7i forms and looking at extended for other reasons, but I haven’t heard anything great about the extended work order scheduler (drag-n-drop to calendar).
I’m really looking for ways that 7i users are manipulating work orders efficiently when dealing with large numbers of small 30min – 2 hour jobs.