A Schedule for Sustainability: CFMX Weekly Work Plan
What is the key difference between the Weekly Work Plan and other scheduling tools? Put simply, it all revolves around the personal, daily commitment made by the Trade Partner/Last Planner. And it can’t be just an impersonal nod or empty agreement. The level of commitment required for accomplishment must be personal and intentional to ensure the proper amount of consideration and preparation has been made for a high degree of success.
Gone are the days of showing up and deciding each morning where the most “convenient” location will be for a crew to unload and start to work. The decisions need to be purposeful, and they must make sense – based on logic and strategy not convenience and assumption. And there must be a high degree of determination to make each work item commence in the designated location to maintain the takt production flow.
Fortunately for you, we have this covered! The CFMx dashboard leads each team to the correct work item and location consistently and in a failsafe manner. It is then up to the Last Planner and his crew to proactively commit during the Make Ready Planning phase, without assuming a level of flexibility that has become common in our industry. Once commitment has been established, the Last Planner (frontline supervisor) must then perform a quick-change handoff from the outgoing supervisor as his crew completes the pacemaker tasks in each designated area and then proactively prepare the pacemaker activities for the next. This flow can be seen in the image below.
Practical Projections
Projecting manpower requirements using CPM or Gantt Charts can be tedious and time consuming to say the least. But with CFMx, it only takes minutes and becomes a very practical part of the initial Trade Partner Planning. How? With areas and pacemakers providing balance to the trade work required each week, the crew size for each pacemaker should be close to the same for each area. So, the worksheets for every trade partner (provided by the CFMx program) can be printed and handed out during each weekly meeting, or completed during the discussion, to ensure takt time progression and optimum flow efficiency. An example of these worksheets can be seen below.
Now, once the worksheets are complete and the information is placed in the CFMx, our program provides the total number of men required for each week along the Balanced Production Front. The calculation can then be provided by trade or for the total project. The Histogram shown below clearly displays the weekly totals and trends can be quickly identified for possible adjustment.
Takt On Track
It’s sometimes difficult to see the usefulness of tools with less detail than the Weekly Work Plan, but the Manpower Worksheets are much faster to complete and help begin the discussion of the crew size before even going into the details of the Weekly Work Plan. This is helpful because it keeps every trade on track for a solid completion date. And, given that the Weekly Workplan is being developed with crews at a preliminary size, the number of activities committed to per week will be limited, consequently forcing the trade partners to focus more closely on their commitments, and/or adjust the manpower projections. The CFMx provides simple and effective tools aimed at assisting the trade partners to understand the flow and pace of production earlier and easier than other Takt Planning tools. And this sets the trade partner up for greater success with both momentum and sustainability.
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