Hi Michael,
The question you ask has specific methods to calculate how many of which craft one needs to support the plant. What I describe here may generate a lot of questions, so I am open to a Teams or Zoom discussion. This is the core of how I've been successful helping maintenance organizations right-size for over 20 major corporations.
Assuming that you are estimating the manhours required during job planning and measuring how close you come to those estimates during KPI review, there are two elements.
The first element looks at the known, predictable components of maintenance: PM's and PdM's. Level load the PM and PdM manhours by craft on an annual schedule to eliminate as much peaking as possible. This creates a base for weekly measurement and monitoring of workloads.
The next element comes from Terry Wireman, World Class Maintenance Management. It is Weeks of Work, with a lot of refinements since he published his book. Measuring current backlogs of both proactive and reactive work, it's accuracy is dependent on how well defined (and followed) your work prioritization and definition of job ready for execution is. Namely a job is not "ready for execution" (not placed on schedules to be handed to the crews) until it is due, and materials are known available.
Weeks of Work measures how many weeks of work are in the scheduler's four week, rolling schedule that will generate to the current week for crews to execute. The measure reports how many weeks of work are in the four-week schedule for each crew. If the measure is one week of work for a crew, that crew will run out of work without intervention. If it measures six weeks of work, that crew cannot complete all the work unless they get help.
There is a Weeks of Work worksheet. An Excel spreadsheet for each crew, it allows for emergent and break-in work, performance to estimates, vacations and absenteeism. It can be used for the short-term, moving manpower to the work or calling for contractors. It can also be used for long-term, creating the basis for plant headcount by craft.
As I said, there is more to this than can be intelligibly described in an email. Let me know if you'd like to chat.
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Mike Palm
Managing Partner
Convergent Results
Cockeysville MD
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-25-2023 05:46 PM
From: Michael Stack
Subject: How to calculate number of maintenance technicians needed to support a plant
Looking for information on how to calculate the number of maintenance techs needed to support a Stamping Plant.
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Michael Stack
Senior Maintenance Engineer
Nissan North America
Madison MS
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