WorldCLASS:: Borough Council Grounds Maintenance



"Planning & Scheduling"

A Hertfordshire Borough Council chose WorldCLASS::APS - with their proven track record of successful planning and scheduling projects - to build a purpose built planner and scheduler for their grounds maintenance.
The scope of the system is:
52 weeks of planning for the teams of permanent and contract staff covering all areas of grounds maintenance, grass cutting, cemetary work, arbor specialists etc.
1-2 weeks short term scheduling of the same teams to optimise the teams' performance to meet the mix of routine tasks eg grass cutting and ad hoc tasks eg "act of god" tree damage.
Performance monitoring of the teams achievements against the scheduled tasks was a key requirement included in the packaged solution.
The scheduler takes into account team calendars and the availablity of suitable plant and equipment.
The task demands are matched to the available team capability over both the longer term planning horizon and the short term scheduling horizon.


The Problem In Perspective

Traditionally, the capacity planning of Council grounds maintenance has been performed manually or by using a spreadsheet. With the growing complexity of the tasks, rates to achieve these, specialist plant and equipment available to be used and the public's need to see the jobs completed asap, such methods have proved inadequate. The problem is that the planning of one team's work interacts with others and ad hoc tasks that are life threatening have to take priority over routine tasks (although these still need to be completed on time!)
The WorldCLASS::Scheduler takes the task priorities into account to produce a comprehensive and complete scheduled task list which utilises team capacity (and plant and equipment) as effectively as possible and then measures the performance against that schedule as the tasks are reported as complete or late.



"Infinite Planning"

Usually, effective capacity planning requires three stages. Firstly, assuming infinite capacity, a plan is created from the demand forecast and current sales orders, taking into account routing, durations and delivery dates. Secondly, each resource type is analysed for capacity overloads. Then finally the plan is modified to smooth these overloads, optionally utilising any slack and producing revised plan dates, which become the available to promise (A-T-P) dates.
In the grounds maintenance planner it was decided to stop at the level of the infinite plan, as shown in the screenshot above.
The finite element of the grounds maintenance APS is achieved in the finite scheduling of the first two weekly buckets of planned tasks, (both routine and ad hoc.)

The legend of the teams is fairly self explanatory for those involved in grounds maintenance, where arb1 is the arbour team, cem1 the cemetary team and so on.
This is the default view of the capacity planning chart where all teams are shown.
By simply changing "All" to the required area, the overview of that area's plan is then shown.
So by selecting one of the golf courses "golf1" the planned capacity utilisation of the team in that area is then shown, as in the screen shot below.



"Planning of teams"

The above screen shot shows the planning of one of the golf course teams.
The scroll bar arrows are used to navigate through the weekly buckets, so that 4 or 5 weekly buckets are in the view at any one time.
Here the golf1 team are 212% loaded in week commencing 10/7/06, 104% in 17/7/06, 85% in 24/7/06 and 79% in 31/7/06.
This overload is addressed by the finite scheduling of all the teams on all the tasks.
But this view gives a snapshot of the loading of each of the teams prior to scheduling and shows the need for the scheduler!
Drill down on this screen provides the detail of the tasks behind this snapshot.(Not shown)

Clicking on "Base Data" (top of screen) produces a drop down menu of all the data behind the system.
Obviously this is very comprehensive, that which is required to do the job.
Employee availability is just one such sub-section of base data.
By clicking on this, and selecting Agency 23 staff, his/her start and end shift times are shown, as in the screen shot below
So their shift pattern is a 7.30AM start, finishing at 12PM for lunch, restarting at 1PM until 4.30PM, shown 12/7/06-19/07/06 in the screen shot.
This data is used by both the Planning and Scheduling system.
If that person was unavailable for part or all of a shift that would be shown here and taken into account by the Planning and Scheduling system.






"Scheduling of teams"

Optimally scheduled tasks are displayed on a Gantt Chart with Council areas shown down the y-axis, the task ID shown on the chart and the time it should take the team(s) to complete the scheduled task shown on the x-axis (at the top of the screen).
In the chart shown below, for example, task 4 for the cemetary team (cem1) is due to start around 9.25AM and to finish at the lunch break on 10/7/06.
This team is due to resume after lunch at 1PM with task 5.
The scheduling of the tasks takes into account the skills required to perform the tasks as well as the availability of the necessary plant and equipment.
Drilling down on the task ID gives the necessary detail behind that task.





"Integration and Benefits"

The WorldCLASS:: Grounds Maintenance Planner and Scheduler can be used on its own or integrated with existing council software systems which can provide the data on ad hoc tasks to be performed. Input of completed tasks from the WorldCLASS Field Team Scheduling system (mobile handsets in the field) can be displayed on the Schedule Gantt chart for performance monitoring purposes - a direct comparison of scheduled versus actual task completion is then provided.
In this way by integrating the WorldCLASS::APS Scheduler with other modules from the WorldCLASS suite; in particular the WorldCLASS::Planner, significant performance improvements in the day to day completion of a complex mix of ad hoc and routine tasks can be achieved:

Improved due date adherence - an accurate customer Promise date (higher on time achievement of tasks) - combined with -

Improved visibility of planned and scheduled tasks

Optimised makespan using APS

Shorter task lead times

Increased performance of teams and utilisation of plant and equipment.

Please contact the WorldCLASS Sales Office for further information or an on-site demonstration, on:
+44 1386 871904

or e-mail us
Stephen Foster