C-Desk Technology

Plan of Work

The Plan of Work is the Production Plan that should happen on a shift to produce the required output. If your organisation uses SAP, or any of the other providers of similar work planning tools, then you will be familiar with the concepts of using software to help create a plan of work far into the future. These tools rely on statistics, such as the average time it takes to make a product, process a phone call, complete a truck delivery, or repair an item such an ATM or printing press. This is the planning part of the process. Using the plan requires a large amount of planning control at a local level that organises the required resources from the available resources. The required resources are the resources which are required to complete the plan of work assigned to each shift, on the other hand the available resources are the resources available on that shift to do the actual work. These are rarely the same. The key available resources are manpower and skills. It is now easy to combine a Plan of Work and the Staff Roster, so that the required resources and available resources are one and the same.

Firefighting.

What we often find within organisations is that the Shift Manager is forced to do this by hand on a shift-by-shift basis, often at the start of each shift. The technique is to 'see' who is there and reorganise the work according to a priority, such as; meeting a deadline or maximising utilisation rates. This technique is rarely analytical and relies on human resources such as memory and experience.