Planning to avoid Critical Mass
In the Open Standard
James BarnesMember for 19 years 1 month
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I’m interested in recommended texts and techniques for planning "bulk work" activities in maintainence shutdowns. These are the multitude of long float activities that can often be carried out independantly of one another. They become their own critical path (or critical mass) when the MH required to complete them before the end of the execution phase exceeds the resources available.
in essence; it doesn’t usually matter what order the work is done in, so long as completed work is being achieved at a rate which will see the completion of the bulk as a whole match or beat that of the critical path(s). There are things which affect the efficiency of this work, shared resources (work area, cranage, scaffolding etc) for example.
We have a system to deal with this at the moment, but I feel that it lacks a certain flexibility and am interested to explore different avenues.
any recommendations or anecdotal advice would be appreciated
in essence; it doesn’t usually matter what order the work is done in, so long as completed work is being achieved at a rate which will see the completion of the bulk as a whole match or beat that of the critical path(s). There are things which affect the efficiency of this work, shared resources (work area, cranage, scaffolding etc) for example.
We have a system to deal with this at the moment, but I feel that it lacks a certain flexibility and am interested to explore different avenues.
any recommendations or anecdotal advice would be appreciated
1 reply
Oldest first- 0James Griffiths ·James,
Where you have independent activities, then the flexibility that exists is only dependent upon the number of different orders-of-execution. ie. if you have three activities,A,B,C, then there are 6 different orders-of-execution.
The only way to acquire more efficient orders-of-execution is by planning each activity at a deeper-and-deeper level of detail. This will then raise any resource conflicts, thus defining the shortest critical path. Essentially, you’ll be "line-balancing", such that no activity will have any float. This is how manufacturing companies make themselves more efficient - by removing "dead time" wherever possible.
I don’t know of any particular texts that deal with this sort of thing, but good scheduling software should enable you to get a pretty good answer. If your resources are finite, then that makes life a lot easier. Once again, however, you will need to programme at a very deep level of detail.
We had a good example of such an exercise; whereby there was a dynamic handling system that went through a specific series of activities, with various paths that crossed. The objective was to determine the maximum number of systems that could be used before a process "clash" ocurred. We programmed the activities down to the last second. It transpired that we could only run two sets of handling elements concurrently. If we used a third, then a clash would occur after a set time. Ok, only using two sets of elements gave us a "less efficient" process, but the advantage was that you didn’t have to spend the capital cost and also didn’t have to worry about a clash.
HTH
James.
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