Planning and Scheduling

This document explains the concept of planning and scheduling, which forms a part of a much larger maintenance management process.

Outcome

In the Planning process you have evaluated the long and medium-term impact of future work on the organization. The planning process considers critical labor, material and tools requirements.

In the Scheduling process you have evaluated how to manage the short-term management of maintenance work. This process considers requirements such detailed allocation of employees to jobs, or jobs to maintenance bays.

Outline

Purpose

Planning

The objective with the Planning process is to evaluate the long and medium-term impact of future work on the organization. The planning process considers critical labor, material and tools requirement.

The planning process primarily considers future maintenance work requests, however work order can be included in the planning session.

Scheduling

The objective with the Scheduling process is to manage the short-term management of maintenance work. This process could consider requirements such as labor demands, materials and parts and tools.

When

You can trigger the maintenance management process in one of two ways:

Through pre-defined scheduled maintenance needs that are configured as services with repeating intervals. A powerful Service Requirements Planning (SRP) engine then takes information from the equipment's future operational forecast together with its current actual runtime information and calculates the service demands. These demands can be calculated just for the next event or for all events on that equipment for its long-term future. This type of work is typical where a customer has taken out a service contract for the maintenance of their equipment. Scheduled maintenance work is typically pre-defined with the necessary task information, parts requirements, tools, documents etc, this means that when the work is due, little or no extra work estimation is required on the work request.
Through unplanned requests which are created for specific customer demands such as in a breakdown situation or where the customer has not taken out a scheduled maintenance contract. By nature, this type of work often needs some level of work estimation to establish the exact requirements and likely costs of the work and may form part of a quotation before the work commences.

How

Planning

All work, irrespective of its nature, is created as a work request and then converted into a work order before the work is due to start. The point at which the request is released is referred to as the 'Release date' and this is usually some time before the work is actually due to start to allow for preparation time during which the Planning and Scheduling processes are carried out.

Planning can be visualized in two main ways:

By using 'Work Request. Open' (MOS170).
By using M3 Planning Workbench (M3 PWB) which provide simulation capabilities.

The M3 Planning Workbench utilizes a concept within M3 Business Engine called macro orders. Macro orders allow users to simplify the planning process by merging maintenance activities together to remove the complexity of trying to carry out long-term planning with a large volume of maintenance records. For example, when looking at the maintenance requirements of a depot two or three years into the future, it is probably not necessary to see the detail of every single job, but a summary for a particular period.

Of course, as the planning process considers work closing to the current period, then more detail may be required.

Note: Once configured, macro orders will be automatically created and updated for work requests and work orders.

M3 Planning Workbench (M3 PWB) imports macro orders (i.e. maintenance requests and work orders) and allows the user to select and group information in a variety of user definable ways to assist in finding potential planning issues. M3 Planning Workbench (M3 PWB) then provides tools to solve those issues by, for example, rescheduling the work or changing the work center that will carry out the work.

Decisions made with the M3 Planning Workbench (M3 PWB) can then be exported back to M3 Business Engine and implemented automatically or manually depending on the user's configuration.

Scheduling

Scheduling can be visualized in two main ways.

By using 'Work Schedule. Open Toolbox' (MOS195).
By using the GANTT chart planning tool in 'Maintenance Scheduling Board. Open' (MOS199).

The Maintenance Scheduling Board displays work order information directly from M3 Business Engine Planning information and provides a Gantt chart view to visualize maintenance work allocation. Drag and drop capabilities can be utilized within the 'Maintenance Scheduling Board. Open' (MOS199) to reschedule work and to allocate work to individual employees. The 'Maintenance Scheduling Board. Open' (MOS199) also provides access to other standard M3 Business Engines functions as well such as component availability checks and work order reporting.