Planner productivity: turning 'do we need another planner?' into a number

A plant has three planners on the books and a backlog that never seems to shrink. More work is called in each week than is prepared and scheduled, and nobody can say whether the planners are genuinely overloaded or whether their time is leaking away into things that are not really planning. Until you measure what each planner produces, hiring a fourth is just an expensive guess.

Planner productivity is the measure that ends the guessing. It puts a number on how much planned work a planner actually prepares.

What it actually measures

Planner productivity is the average volume of planned work one planner prepares per month, expressed either as planned labour hours or as the number of job plans completed. A job plan is the full package built for a work order: the labour estimate, the material list, the tooling, drawings, procedures and safety requirements, everything a craftsperson needs to do the job without stopping to search.

How to work it out

Planner productivity = Planned labour hours / Number of months

Over a year, one planner prepares job plans totalling 35,401 labour hours.

Planner productivity = 35,401 / 12 = 2,950 labour hours per month

That baseline is the point. If the same planner drops to 1,800 hours a month after a system change, you have a measurable signal to investigate, rather than a vague sense that something feels off.

The ratio that frames it

Planner productivity makes most sense read against how many tradespeople each planner serves. The widely cited range is one planner for every 15 to 25 craftspeople, with about 20 the practical optimum. Push beyond 25 and something predictable happens: the planner can no longer plan, and quietly becomes an expediter, chasing parts for jobs already in trouble instead of preparing the work still to come. That tipping point is why the ratio is described as the difference between a planning function and a fire brigade with a desk.

It is worth remembering how rare good planning still is, too. A large share of plants employ no planners at all, and many of those that do bury them under a craft load they could never properly serve. Yet the leverage of getting it right is extraordinary: a single planner, by lifting a crew's hands-on time, is worth something like seventeen extra technicians to a thirty-strong team. Measured against that, the question is rarely whether you can afford planners; it is whether you can afford to overload the ones you have.

What good looks like

There is no single benchmark across industries; the right output depends on the planner's experience, the plant, the complexity of the work, and the maturity of the system supporting them. A seasoned planner drawing on a well-stocked library of reusable job plans will naturally outproduce a newcomer building every plan from scratch. Establish your own baseline and use it to drive steady improvement, rather than to rank people against an outside number.

Where it can mislead you

• Counting job plans alone is misleading; planned labour hours give the truer measure, because a count rewards a month of simple tasks and punishes a month of complex overhauls even when the second was far more valuable.
• Expediting is not planning. A planner pulled into chasing parts, supervising, manning the help desk or fighting today's emergency is not producing planned work, and this figure will understate the real problem while the planning function quietly collapses.
• Compare like with like. A mechanical planner and an instrument planner work on very different jobs, so cross-discipline league tables rarely tell you much.
• Inaccurate planned-hour estimates will inflate or deflate the number, so read it alongside the estimating-accuracy metrics.

Planner productivity turns one of the most common maintenance questions, do we have enough planners, from a matter of gut feeling into one of evidence. And since every planned job lifts the productivity of the whole crew behind it, protecting your planners' time, and knowing their true output, is one of the highest-leverage things a maintenance organisation can do.