Planning Efficiency Loss and Operator Discipline
Every planned stop holds two losses with opposite owners. Planning Efficiency Loss is the time management scheduled for the task, owned by planning. Operator Discipline is the time execution lost or gained against the Standard Allowed Time, and the overruns alone, the Operator Discipline loss, are the compliance opportunity, owned by the operator. Rolled into one "planned downtime" number, neither gets fixed. Measured apart, one is re-planned and the other is coached.
Two losses, two owners
Most plants report planned downtime as a single figure: a 45-minute changeover is "45 minutes lost". That figure cannot say whether the standard was 30 minutes and the crew overran by 15, or whether 45 was the right standard and the execution was perfect. Augos keeps a ledger of every planned stop, changeovers, clean-in-place cycles, sanitation, breaks and maintenance windows, against the Standard Allowed Time for that task on that line and product. The schedule's share of the time is Planning Efficiency Loss. The variance between standard and execution is Operator Discipline. Operators are not penalised for following management's schedule, and management is not credited for a tight standard the floor cannot meet.
Source: Augos Factory method, Glossary: Planning Efficiency Loss, Operator Discipline
The Standard Allowed Time
The Standard Allowed Time is the approved duration for a specific planned task on a specific line and product: 170 minutes for a clean-in-place cycle on a beverage line, 10 minutes for a tank change, 30 for a changeover between two pack sizes. It lives in a standards dictionary maintained by the plant's industrial or continuous-improvement engineers; operators cannot edit the standard they are measured against. Every planned event needs one, because the operator declares the stop on the Augos Operator Terminal ("start changeover", "start cleaning") and the platform times it until the line restarts. A fault and a changeover look the same to a sensor; the declaration is what tells them apart, and a declared planned stop cannot later be reclassified by the operator, so breakdowns cannot be hidden inside the cleaning bucket.
Planning Efficiency Loss
Planning Efficiency Loss is the total time formally scheduled for planned tasks: the sum of the Standard Allowed Times of the planned stops the schedule called for. It is excluded from the Availability calculation, because the operators did what the plan asked, and it is owned by planning. It is not waste in the way a breakdown is, but it is production the plant chose not to make, and when it is a large share of paid time it is a question for the schedule: too many short runs, too many changeovers, a cleaning regime set once and never revisited.
Operator Discipline
Operator Discipline is the time execution lost or gained against the standard: actual duration minus Standard Allowed Time, summed across the planned stops in the period. It is a record of what happened. The overruns alone, the Operator Discipline loss, are the compliance opportunity: the time above the standard on each stop that ran over, with every gain left out. The opportunity is owned by the operator, because the standard is the agreed way to do the task and the overrun is the gap between the agreed way and what happened. Augos reports it in minutes first, because minutes are what the line gets back; Compliance %, the share of planned stops finished within their standard, sits alongside it for comparing tasks and periods.
Capacity Opportunity
When the operator finishes a 30-minute changeover in 20, the variance is minus 10 minutes. That is recorded as a gain rather than ignored. When operators consistently finish under the standard, the standard is too loose, and the recovered minutes are a Capacity Opportunity: tightening the standard, through industrial engineering, locks them into the plan permanently instead of letting them drift back. The platform keeps the two sides apart. Overruns are summed as Operator Discipline loss, which is the compliance opportunity; under-runs are summed as Capacity Opportunity. The net of the two is the Operator Discipline account, which ties to paid time, but as the real month below demonstrates, the net on its own can hide both problems at once.
Source: Augos Factory method, Glossary: Capacity Opportunity
Worked example
A changeover has a Standard Allowed Time of 30 minutes.
| Event | Actual | Variance | Recorded as | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduled time | 30 min | Planning Efficiency Loss 30 min | Planning | |
| Changeover A | 48 min | +18 min | Operator Discipline loss 18 min | Operator |
| Changeover B | 20 min | −10 min | Capacity Opportunity 10 min | Planning (tighten the standard) |
| Changeover C | 30 min | 0 | Within standard |
Over the three events the schedule consumed 90 minutes (Planning Efficiency Loss), execution ran 18 minutes over (Operator Discipline loss) and 10 minutes under (Capacity Opportunity). The net variance is +8 minutes, which is true and almost useless: it says nothing about the 18 minutes to coach or the 10 minutes to lock in. Two of the three changeovers finished within the standard, so Compliance % is 66.7%; changeover A is the one that failed.
Source: Augos Factory method; the 30 minute standard, 48 minute actual example is the canonical worked example
A real month of planned stops
The beverage packaging line used across the method pages logged 131 planned stops in one month in 2026, 720 paid hours.
| Measure | Figure | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Planning Efficiency Loss (sum of standards) | 113.4 h · 15.7% of paid time | Planning |
| Operator Discipline loss (overruns) | 19.5 h | Operator |
| Capacity Opportunity (under-runs) | 24.3 h | Planning (standards) |
| Net variance | −4.8 h | |
| Planned stops within standard | 43 of 131 · about one in three |
Reported as a net figure, this line beat its standards by nearly five hours and planned downtime looks healthy. Reported as two sides, it spent 19.5 hours over standard on some tasks while leaving 24.3 hours of loose standard on others, and only one planned stop in three landed inside its allowance. The clean-in-place cycle shows both at once. Its standard was 170 minutes and it ran 24 times. Thirteen cycles ran over, for 7.6 hours of Operator Discipline loss; the fastest quarter finished in 143 minutes, so the standard has room to tighten. Two very short cycles, 8 and 27 minutes, were flagged as low outliers and kept out of the baseline. At the other extreme, a two-minute quality-check standard was missed on 27 of 39 events with a median of 4 minutes. When nearly everyone misses a standard, the standard is the problem, and that is a planning conversation rather than a discipline one.
Source: Augos platform, Planned Stoppage analysis and Performance Overview, one anonymised beverage line, a 30-day month in 2026
Compliance as a percentage
Compliance % is the share of planned stops finished within their allocated time. Each stop is a pass or a fail: a changeover with a 30-minute standard that takes 45 minutes fails, and one that takes 20 passes. The Planned Stoppage report shows it for a period or a line: 43 of 131, about one in three, on the line above. It is useful for comparing tasks, operators and months. It is not the loss. The loss is the minutes, which is why Augos leads with them.
Source: Augos Factory method, Operator Analysis and Planned Stoppage definitions; Glossary
Common questions
What is Planning Efficiency Loss?
The time management scheduled for planned stops, measured as the sum of their Standard Allowed Times. It is owned by planning and excluded from the Availability calculation, so operators are not penalised for following the schedule.
What is Operator Discipline?
The time a planned task actually lost or gained against its Standard Allowed Time, summed across the period. The overruns alone, the Operator Discipline loss, are the compliance opportunity, owned by the operator. A 30-minute changeover that runs 48 minutes records 18 minutes of Operator Discipline loss.
What happens when a task finishes under the standard?
The under-run is recorded as a Capacity Opportunity. Consistently beating the standard means the standard is too loose; tightening it locks the recovered time into the plan.
Why not just report planned downtime as one number?
Because one number cannot say whether the schedule or the execution caused it, and the two have different owners and different fixes. On one real line the net variance was a 4.8 hour gain while 19.5 hours of overruns sat underneath it.
How does the platform know a stop is planned and not a breakdown?
The operator declares it on the Augos Operator Terminal before it starts. Once a stop is logged as an unplanned fault, the operator cannot reclassify it as planned.