BUSINESS OPERATIONS: Scheduling is Critical

Running your company without a basic operations schedule isn’t a good practice, but we’ve all done it. My wife and I recently spent two months in Southeast Asia and encountered similar stress. While in Vietnam, the Dec. 26 tsunami hit Phuket, Thailand – a place we were planning to visit in less than a week. We obviously had to scramble to change our schedule, dealing with non-English-speaking individuals, foreign visas, etc. Thankfully, we had a basic schedule to start with and were able to review all of our options and make adjustments to our tour.

In business you do the same thing, but it is much harder when you don’t have a schedule to begin with. To outline how company operations should run, I strongly recommend giving every crew an individual schedule board to track its progress. Display these boards on a common-room wall for everyone to review regularly, keeping everyone organized and accountable.

Maintenance crews work best with a two-week schedule board, as they usually visit the same jobs each day of the week. However, landscape, irrigation, lawn care and similar crews require full five-week (one month) schedule boards. These crews go to different jobs each week and, therefore, must be able to see what is scheduled even a few weeks out.

The schedule boards should be made of dry-erase material so you can mark them up and make changes easily. Lay out the boards with Monday-thru-Friday schedules and avoid making Saturday a regular workday. Remember, overtime is a killer. If you must work on a Saturday, it’s always possible to squeeze the details of those jobs into Friday’s space. 

Above each board, Write the crew leader and crewmembers’ names. You may even post pictures of each person above their schedule boards to help everyone in the organization put faces with names, particularly in the spring when new employees are coming on board.

In the block for each day, write the names of the jobs to be serviced in the appropriate order. Next to each job – this is the most important step – write its total budgeted labor-hours. Also include indirect or non-productive labor for each day’s jobs and the budgeted labor-hours for each portion of the crew’s day. This lets you schedule every function the crews are to perform and exactly how long you expect them to take, creating accountability for the single highest expense you incur. Total up the hours and write this in the same block so the crew knows how long they should be out that particular day.

At the end of each day, have the crew leaders write the total hours the crews worked next to the budgeted hours and put a red circle around it. This sends crew leaders a message of the importance to the company that their crews stay within allotted hours. Also, everyone who looks at the schedule board knows if they were on target. When the next week begins, supervisors can erase the circled hours while the crews work from the second week’s board. Remember, never schedule work without providing the budgeted hours to the crew leader.

One giveaway that a company does not schedule well or hold its people accountable is to see all the maintenance crews arrive back at the yard close to the same time each day. How can that be with the variety of jobs and their sizes? When this happens, some crews could possibly (or purposefully) be lagging behind when coming in and others might be sacrificing quality in order to be in at a certain time. 

This spring, when you’ve created these schedule boards you’ll have developed a good game plan. As your phone starts ringing, your plans will change, but you’ll be able to take out your dry-erase marker and reschedule the week’s work much more easily. Good luck!