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

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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 What We Do
What We Do Feeding and Fueling the World
Bunge processes oilseeds, grains, sugarcane and other agricultural commodities to
make products and ingredients with numerous applications for customers worldwide.

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

Planning & Scheduling Goals

Available and Reliable Production
Capacity
Encounter Less
Reactive Work
Complete More
Proactive Work

Increase Labor Productivity

Planning and Scheduling

Doc Palmer

Generate Proactive
Work Orders

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
7

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
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Scheduling Prerequisites - Tools

Weekly scheduling tool
Daily scheduling tool

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

10

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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100% Scheduling Why We Do It

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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100% Scheduling Why We Do It

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

13

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

14

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

16

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
Number of completed
work orders jumped as
scheduling started to
work. Ready backlog
dropped as total backlog
was reduced
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Example Results Atchison Plant

Planning metrics are
showing consistent
improvement. Our
goal is to have >80%
planned work
Number of created and
modified job plans
indicate how well the
continuous improvement
cycle is working
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Example Results Bellevue Plant

Total work order backlog decreased due to initial
backlog cleanup and 100% Scheduling

22

Example Results Cairo Plant

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

23

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
25

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

26

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
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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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Effective Change Management

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

30

Effective Change Management

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

31

Effective Change Management

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
33

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
34

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

35

Key Lessons Learned

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.
36

Questions & Answers

Brian Dietsch Brian.Dietsch@Bunge.com

Doc Palmer DocPalmer@palmerplanning.com

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