Last Updated on October 29, 2023 by maximosecrets

The Calendar does not define the availability of a labor or crew alone. With its shifts the calendar defines the work periods that would be considered working time from other periods in a day or week which would be considered non-working time. The calendar is designed to be shared between multiple labor or crews, availability is defined separately to the calendar in the People, Crew, Assignment Manager, or the Graphical Resource View applications.

Individual availability is defined in the People application and not in the Labor application, although it is the Labor records which are assigned to work. This is because the People application is based on the PERSON record which is defined at the System level. A LABOR record is defined at the Organization level, a person can have multiple associated labor records, one for each organization where they can perform work. However, if the person is unavailable, because they are on vacation or sick, then they would be unavailable in all the organizations, hence, availability is entered in the People application. 

My person identifier is AJE – Andrew Jeffery and I work on the OFFICE calendar and OFFICE shift that we created as part of the Calendars article. This is a calendar with an 08:00 to 17:00 working pattern, Monday to Friday, with 8 work hours and a lunch break between 12:00 and 13:00. DBO (Danny Bols) is defined as my Supervisor. I work in the UK, and a different time zone to Danny who is Belgium, which is generally 1 hour in front.

When the action Modify Person Availability is used a dialog opens with today and the next four working days shown, the working days between the fields Display From and Display To, a span of 7 days. I am aiming to take Friday, 16^th October as a vacation day. Select the date in the left-hand check box and use the Modify button.

This transfers the date into the Modify Work Dates table window where you can pick a reason code, VAC (Vacation). The whole workday will be assumed but you can adjust the Start or End Times if you were going to be on vacation for just half a day. If you adjust the Start Time or End Time, the Hours will be calculated as the difference between the two. The OFFICE calendar and shift is based on an 8 hour work day in the elapsed period of 9 hours between 08:00 and 17:00, so be careful, if you changed the end time for half a day (12:00) and then changed it back to the normal end time (17:00) it will be recalculated as 9 hours and not 8 hours, easier to just use the delete button on the table window.

If you wished to book a future vacation day beyond the current display of dates you could use the New Row button and then select the Work Date. This is only for the entry of one day at a time. 

If you press the OK button, the record is saved and the dialog closes. By using the Modify Person Availability action again you will see any records in the Modify Work Dates table window if the Work Date is between the date range of the fields Display From and Display To.

By changing either the Display From or Display To fields the new work dates will be fetched from the database, you may have to wait a few seconds, it is not immediate, you do not need to tab out of the field first. Changing the Display From field to 05^th October found the other two modified availability records from last week, a meeting on the 5^th and a day off on the 07^th October.

I will also be taking vacation for the days between Christmas and New Year.

When changing the Display From and Display To fields, start with the Display To field, then quickly change the Display From field, before you get 90 work dates (05-October to 02-January) displayed. Not intuitive you would agree, there is a validation on the two fields, the Display From field cannot be after the Display To field.

Select the dates where you want to make a change (28-30^th December) and this time use the Mass Modify Button. The Start and End Time will be entered in the dialog that opens, but not the Hours. I entered 8:00 work hours and the VAC – Vacation reason code.

When pressing the OK button, the effect of the Mass Modify will create the vacation records for the selected dates, these will be saved if you then use the OK button to close the dialog. Note the 25^th December, 28^th December and 1^st January are defined as Non-working time in the calendar, but the only evidence of that here is that the Shift Hours are marked as 0:00.

There is also a Modify Person Availability action available from the List tab. I’ve selected two of my colleagues, we all have the same OFFICE calendar and shift. If everyone that is selected is not on the same calendar and shift you will receive the error “BMXAA9166E – The selected person records do not have the same calendar and shift values. To modify the availability of people, you must ensure that each selected person has the same values in the calendar and shift fields.”

The dialog looks different, it has a People table window at the top, and by default everyone is selected.

There is a meeting tomorrow (15^th October) at 15:30 for 1.5 hours which all three of us are involved in. 

The 15^th October was selected and the Mass Modify button used. The Start Time was modified to 15:30 and the Hours was recalculated to 1:30 hours, the Reason Code of MEET was selected. 

On pressing the OK button, the Meeting record is transferred to the Modify Work Dates table window. Unfortunately, there is a difference between Maximo 7.6.1.2 which only does this for the first person in the list, AJE in this case. In Maximo 7.6.1.1 if you highlight the other persons, DBO and JWS in turn you will find that they also have their own Modify Work Date record. This issue on Maximo 7.6.1.2 has now been fixed, see APAR IJ28723.

If you have selected multiple dates on Maximo 7.6.1.1 then multiple Modify Work Date records will be created for each selected person. The Modify button will only make changes for the highlighted person, and not multiple people.

There is an implicit save after using the Mass Modify button. If you close the dialog by using the Cancel button you will find that the Modify Work Date records have already been saved to the database.

Just a word of warning, if you are modifying multiple people who work in different time zones, perhaps for a meeting, then there is no correction for time zones. AJE works one hour behind DBO and JWS, the meeting in his calendar needs to be 14:30 to 16:00 and not 15:30 to 17:00. 

Passing Thoughts

The Modify Person Availability from the List Tab of the People application was the only place where you could modify the availability of multiple people, that is until the Graphical Resource View application became available in Maximo Scheduler 7.6.8. In the Assignment Manager application, the Modify Availability dialog is for a single person/labor, you cannot update multiple people at the same time. There is no ability to modify the availability of a person/labor in the Work Order Tracking application nor in the Labor or Labor Reporting applications.

When the Modify Person Availability dialog opens it by default shows the working days in a 7-day time window from today, the difference between the Display From and Display To fields. There is a MAXVARS value for this where the variable name (VARNAME) is called MODAVAILROWS. There is no user interface for changing this value, but if you were to create one the obvious place to put it is in the Calendar section of System Settings dialog in the OrganizationsA structural element of a Maximo database which is used for data sharing and is often aligned to a legal entity of an organisation. More application.