Schedule compliance (work orders): did the jobs you committed to actually get done?

The weekly schedule listed 135 work orders. By Friday, 113 of them were done on time. Another 45 emergency jobs had also been completed, but those were never on the schedule. They broke in.

The question is not whether the crew was busy. They obviously were. The question is whether they completed what was planned, and that is precisely what this version of schedule compliance answers.

What it actually measures

Schedule compliance measured in work orders is the percentage of the work orders on the weekly schedule that were executed when they were scheduled. Emergency and unplanned jobs finished during the week do not count toward it; they were not on the original plan, and rewarding them would defeat the whole purpose of measuring adherence to it.

How to work it out

Schedule compliance, work orders (%) = (Work orders done as scheduled × 100) / Total scheduled work orders

Of 135 scheduled work orders, 113 were completed as planned.

Schedule compliance = (113 × 100) / 135 = 83.7%

At nearly 84%, the crew is close to but short of the mark. Spotting which job types are most often the ones displaced shows where the scheduling or planning needs attention.

Why count jobs when you already count hours

At first glance this looks redundant: if you already measure compliance in hours, why also count work orders? Because the two can disagree in a way that matters. A handful of very large jobs can fill the hours figure and make a week look compliant while a long string of smaller, high-priority tasks quietly slips through the cracks, each one too small to dent the hours total but collectively a real failure to deliver. Counting work orders catches that. It checks whether the crew honoured the plan at the level of individual commitments, not just total time on the tools. Think of the hours measure as the primary gauge of how much of the plan was delivered, and the work-order count as the complementary check on whether the right jobs were the ones that got done.

What the gap between them tells you

Because the two measures can part company, the gap itself is a diagnosis. When the hours figure looks healthy but the work-order count lags, you are almost always watching small, high-priority jobs slip while a few big planned jobs soak up the week, a sign that the schedule is being built around the largest work rather than the most important. When the work-order count is high but the hours figure trails, the opposite is happening: plenty of little jobs are getting ticked off while a major scheduled job stalls or overruns and swallows the time. Neither pattern is visible from a single number, which is the whole reason mature plants keep both on the same chart and read them as a pair.

What good looks like

Best-in-class is greater than 90%, with the same sensible latitude that applies to the hours version: many practitioners treat 85 to 90 per cent as an acceptable band. Read it alongside how much planned work the schedule actually contained, so you can be sure the plan was neither padded nor artificially light. And as with the hours measure, there is a fair-minded convention worth adopting: a job the crew genuinely started but could not finish within the week is usually credited, since the commitment was honoured even if the work ran on past Friday.

Where it can mislead you

• A job pushed from a previous week and finished late does not count as done as scheduled on its original date. Count only jobs completed on the plan they were promised against.
• Emergency jobs completed during the week are unscheduled by definition and never belong in the numerator, however valuable the work was.
• Pair it with the hours-based measure; the hours figure is the primary one, and the two together give a rounded view that neither offers alone.
• Define what counts as a completed work order, consistently across the plant, before you calculate anything, or two schedulers will quietly measure two different things.

Schedule compliance in work orders checks the simplest promise a maintenance team makes: that the jobs it committed to this week would actually be the jobs it did. Kept consistently, that promise is what lets the rest of the plant trust the schedule, and trust in the schedule is what lets planning work at all.