Work management and scheduling uplift

The challenge

Maintenance work is commonly identified in the field, planned in a hurry, scheduled in a weekly meeting and then reshuffled by phone as the week unfolds. Break-in work displaces the plan, jobs wait on parts nobody kitted, and the backlog grows into a list that no longer tells anyone what still matters.

This is a process problem rather than a people problem: unclear gates in the work order lifecycle, planning that starts after scheduling, and metrics defined differently by each person who quotes them. Planners, schedulers and supervisors require a routine they can hold, and measures that mean the same thing every week.

When it's time to act

The signs we commonly see when this initiative is due.

• The weekly schedule is rewritten by phone before Tuesday lunchtime.
• Crews wait on parts because jobs reached the schedule without being kitted.
• Backlog grows quarter on quarter and nobody can say which of it still matters.
• Break-in work is normal rather than exceptional, and nobody signs for it.
• Schedule compliance is quoted weekly and defined differently each time.

Our approach

• Understand the issues with the people living them: planners, schedulers, supervisors and the crews whose week keeps getting rearranged.
• Assess current work management maturity against your own standards and recognised industry practice, so everyone agrees where the process actually sits before anything changes.
• Baseline the measures that matter: schedule compliance, PM compliance, backlog in crew-weeks and break-in rate. What matters is that each is defined once and measured the same way every week, whether that definition comes from the site or from a published set such as the SMRP metrics.
• Redesign the work order lifecycle with clear quality gates: no job reaches the schedule without a complete job pack, materials kitted and access confirmed.
• Institute a weekly frozen schedule with a single approval path for break-in work, which forces the urgency conversation before the schedule breaks rather than after.
• Rebuild backlog health: every order screened, prioritised by risk, and either planned, deferred with a date, or closed.
• Coach planners and supervisors through the new cadence in the field, then hand over a management operating system that reviews the same metrics weekly.

Tools and methods

The value it creates

• Planned work gets done as planned, which is where the cost advantage lives: planned maintenance is consistently cheaper per job than the same work done reactively.
• Break-in work becomes visible and accountable, so genuine emergencies are still handled and everything else waits for the next schedule.
• The cadence is owned by the site rather than the consultants, and the same metrics keep showing whether it is holding after we leave.

What changes

Where these initiatives fail

The failure modes we design against.

• Treating it as a discipline problem and coaching harder, when the process gates are what is failing.
• Freezing the schedule without fixing job readiness, which just makes the failure visible sooner.
• A break-in path without teeth: if nobody is empowered to say no, the gate is decoration.
• Ending the coaching at go-live, before the cadence has survived its first bad month.

Common questions

Key terms

Plain-language definitions from our glossary for the concepts this page leans on.

Standards and further reading

Reference points we draw on where they suit the work. We also work to client internal standards and established site practice.

• Best practices, metrics and guidelines for maintenance and reliability (SMRP)
• ISO 55001:2024 Asset management system requirements (ISO)
• The Asset Management Landscape, third edition (GFMAM)
• Operations and maintenance best practices guide (US DOE Federal Energy Management Program)
• Guidelines library for mining technology and interoperability (Global Mining Guidelines Group)

Further reading

Articles and calculators on the methods behind this work.

• The maintenance job pack, and what has to be in it (article)
• Planner, scheduler, long term planner: three different jobs (article)
• Master data is boring, until your schedule falls apart (article)
• Planning versus break-in: reading your schedule compliance (article)
• Schedule Compliance Calculator (tool)
• Mining solutions (solution)
• Rail solutions (solution)

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