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318 PART THREE DELIVER

WHAT IS PLANNING AND CONTROL?

Planning and control is concerned with the activities that attempt to reconcile the demands of the market and the ability of the operation’s resources to deliver. It provides the systems, procedures and decisions which bring different aspects of supply and demand together. Consider, for example, the way in which routine surgery is organized in a hospital. When a patient arrives and is admitted to the hospital, much of the planning for the surgery will already have happened. The operating theatre will have been reserved, and the doctors and nurses who staff the operating theatre will have been provided with all the information regarding the patient’s condition. Appropriate preoperative and postoperative care will have been organized. All this will involve staff and facilities in different parts of the hospital, all of

whom must have been given the same information and their activities co-ordinated. Soon after the patient arrives, he or she will be checked to make sure that the condition is as expected (in much the same way as material is inspected on arrival in a factory). Blood, if required, will be cross-matched and reserved, and any medication will be made ready (in the same way that all the different materials are brought together in a factory). Any last-minute changes may require some degree of re-planning. For example, if the patient shows unexpected symptoms, observation may be necessary before the surgery can take

place. Not only will this affect the patient’s own treatment, but other patients’ treatment may also have to be rescheduled (in the same way as machines will need rescheduling if a job is delayed in a factory). All these activities of scheduling, co-ordination and organization are concerned with the planning and control of the hospital.

OPERATIONS IN PRACTICE

Joanne Cheung is the Senior Service Adviser at a pre- mier BMW dealership. She and her team act as the interface between customers who want their cars ser- viced and repaired and the 16 technicians who carry out the work in their state-of-the-art workshop. ‘ There are three types of work that we have to organize ’, says Joanne. ‘ The first is performing repairs on customers’ vehicles. They usually want this doing as soon as possible. The second type of job is routine servicing. It is usually not urgent so customers are generally willing to negotiate a time for this. The remainder of our work involves working on the pre-owned cars which our buyer has bought-in to sell on to customers. Before any of these cars can be sold they have to undergo extensive checks. To some extent we treat these categories of work slightly differently. We have to give good service to our internal car buyers, but there is some flexibility in planning these jobs. At the other extreme, emergency repair work for customers has to be fitted into our schedule as quickly as possible. If someone is desperate to have their car repaired at very short notice, we sometimes ask them to drop their car in as early as they can and pick it up as late as possible. This gives us the maximum amount of time to fit it into the schedule.

‘ There are a number of service options open to custom- ers. We can book short jobs in for a fixed time and do it while they wait. Most commonly, we ask the customer to leave the car with us and collect it later. To help customers we have ten loan cars which are booked out on a first-come first-served basis. Alternatively, the vehicle can be collected from the customer’s home and delivered back there when it is ready. Our four drivers who do this are able to cope with up to twelve jobs a day.

‘ Most days we deal with fifty to eighty jobs, tak- ing from half-an-hour up to a whole day. To enter a job

Joanne manages the schedule 1

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CHAPTER 10 PLANNING AND CONTROL 319

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PLANNING AND CONTROL?

Notice that we have chosen to treat ‘planning and control’ together. This is because the divi- sion between ‘planning’ and ‘control’ is not clear, either in theory or in practice. However, there are some general features that help to distinguish between the two. Planning is a formaliza- tion of what is intended to happen at some time in the future. But a plan does not guarantee that an event will actually happen. Rather it is a statement of intention. Although plans are based on expectations, during their implementation things do not always happen as expected. Customers change their minds about what they want and when they want it. Suppliers may not always deliver on time, process technology may fail, or staff may be absent through illness. Control is the process of coping with these types of change. It may mean that plans need to be redrawn in the short term. It may also mean that an ‘intervention’ will need to be made in the operation to bring it back ‘on track’ – for exam- ple, finding a new supplier who can deliver quickly, getting process technology up and running again, or moving staff from another part of the operation to cover for absentees. Control activi- ties make the adjustments which allow the operation to achieve the objectives that the plan has set, even when the assumptions on which the plan was based do not hold true.

Long-, medium- and short-term planning and control The nature of planning and control activities changes over time. In the very long term, oper- ations managers make plans concerning what they intend to do, what resources they need, and what objectives they hope to achieve. The emphasis is on planning rather than control, because there is little to control as such. They will use forecasts of likely demand described in aggregated terms. For example, a hospital will make plans for ‘2,000 patients’ without neces- sarily going into the details of the individual needs of those 2,000 patients. Similarly, the hos- pital might plan to have 100 nurses and 20 doctors, but again without deciding on the specific attributes of the staff. Operations managers will focus mainly on volume and financial targets.

Medium-term planning and control is more detailed. It looks ahead to assess the overall demand which the operation must meet in a partially disaggregated manner. By this time, for example, the hospital must distinguish between different types of demand. The number

into our process all Service Advisers have access to the computer-based scheduling system. On-screen it shows the total capacity we have day-by-day, all the jobs that are booked in, the amount of free capacity still available, the number of loan cars available, and so on. We use this to see when we have the capacity to book a customer in, and then enter all the customer’s details. BMW have issued “standard times” for all the major jobs. However, you have to modify these standard times a bit to take account of cir- cumstances. That is where the Service Adviser’s experience comes in.

‘ We keep all the most commonly used parts in stock, but if a repair needs a part which is not in stock, we can usually get it from the BMW parts distributors within a day. Every evening our planning system prints out the jobs to be done the next day and the parts which are likely to be needed for each job. This allows the parts staff to pick out the parts for each job so that the

technicians can collect them first thing the next morn- ing without any delay.

‘ Every day we have to cope with the unexpected. A technician may find that extra work is needed, custom- ers may want extra work doing, and technicians are sometimes ill, which reduces our capacity. Occasionally parts may not be available so we have to arrange with the customer for the vehicle to be rebooked for a later time. Every day up to four or five customers just don't turn up. Usually they have just forgotten to bring their car in so we have to rebook them in at a later time. We can cope with most of these uncertainties because our technicians are flexible in terms of the skills they have and also are willing to work overtime when needed. Also, it is important to manage customer’s expectations. If there is a chance that the vehicle may not be ready for them, it shouldn't come as a surprise when they try and collect it. '

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322 PART THREE DELIVER

OPERATIONS IN PRACTICE

‘ In many ways a major airline can be viewed as one large planning problem which is usually approached as many independent, smaller (but still difficult) planning prob- lems. The list of things which need planning seems endless: crews, reservation agents, luggage, flights, through trips, maintenance, gates, inventory, equipment purchases. Each planning problem has its own considerations, its own com- plexities, its own set of time horizons, its own objectives, but all are interrelated. ’

Air France has 80 flight planners working 24-hour shifts in its flight planning office at Roissy, Charles de Gaulle. Their job is to establish the optimum flight routes, anticipate any problems such as weather changes and minimize fuel consumption. Overall the goals of the flight planning activity are first, and most important, safety, followed by economy and passenger comfort. Increasingly powerful computer programs process the mountain of data necessary to plan the flights, but in the end many decisions still rely on human judgement. Even the most sophisticated expert systems only serve as support for the flight planners. Planning Air France’s schedule is a massive job. Just some of the considera- tions which need to be taken into account include the following:

● Frequency – for each airport how many separate ser- vices should the airline provide?

● Fleet assignment – which type of aircraft should be used on each leg of a flight?

● Banks – at any airline hub where passengers arrive and may transfer to other flights to continue their journey, airlines like to organize flights into ‘banks’ of several plans which arrive close together, pause to let passengers change planes, and all depart close together. So, how many banks should there be and when should they occur?

● Block times – a block time is the elapsed time between an aircraft leaving the departure gate at an airport and arriving at its gate in the arrival airport.

The longer the allowed block time, the more likely an aircraft will keep to schedule even if it suffers minor delays. However, longer block times also mean fewer flights can be scheduled.

● Planned maintenance – any schedule must allow time for aircraft to have time at a maintenance base.

● Crew planning – pilot and cabin crew must be sched- uled to allocate pilots to fly aircraft on which they are licensed and to keep within maximum ‘on duty ’ times for all staff.

● Gate plotting – if many aircraft are on the ground at the same time there may be problems in loading and unloading them simultaneously.

● Recovery – many things can cause deviations from any plan in the airline industry. Allowances must be built in to allow for recovery.

For flights within and between Air France’s 12 geo- graphic zones, the planners construct a flight plan that will form the basis of the actual flight only a few hours later. All planning documents need to be ready for the flight crew who arrive two hours before the scheduled departure time. Being responsible for passenger safety and comfort, the captain always has the final say and, when satisfied, co-signs the flight plan together with the planning officer.

Operations control at Air France 2

Uncertainty in supply and demand Uncertainty is important in planning and control because it makes it more difficult. Sometimes the supply of inputs to an operation may be uncertain. Local village carnivals, for example, rarely work to plan. Events take longer than expected, some of the acts scheduled in the programme may be delayed en route and some traders may not even arrive. In other operations supply is relatively predictable, and the need for control is minimal. For exam- ple, cable TV services provide programmes to a schedule into subscribers’ homes. It is rare to change the programme plan. Similarly demand may be unpredictable. A fast food outlet

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