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Graphical Work Week – Work View

This is the third of a series of articles on the Graphical Work Week application that was introduced as part of Maximo Scheduler 7.6.8 in the summer of 2020. This article will focus on the Work View, the upper pair of panes on the Graphical View tab.

The Work View is the top half of the Graphical View and the Resource View is on the bottom half. The columns are separated from the Gantt display by a vertical bar which you need to have positioned to show the 7 days of the week. If I nudged it a fraction to the left, I would lose the two horizontal scroll bars to the right of the vertical bar.

There are vertical scroll bars for both the work view and resource view, only the resource view one is shown as with only two work assignments there is no need yet for a vertical scrollbar. At the bottom of the two vertical scrollbars is a button with an arrow pointing to the bottom right of the button, this is used for sizing vertically the work view or the resource view. You should position these so that these two buttons are always seen, and that will help to avoid using the outer vertical scrollbar (not shown), which I have found difficult to use, but then that may be because I use a trackpad instead of a mouse. This outer vertical scrollbar will be found in the vertical white space to the right of the work list name, in this case WW004. It should always be displayed or displayed as soon as it is needed. The issue has been reported to IBM Support.

Postscript – This is a setting on MacOS, System Preferences – General – Show Scroll Bars – Set to Always.

In the Gantt display you can see a vertical red dotted line indicating date and time now, 22nd December 2020 11:30. For the two work assignments that both belong to work order 1314, the resource column shows either the assigned Labor, Lou Granger, or the required Craft, the second work assignment is for a Carpenter, craft CARP. You should have the Start Date displayed as a column so that you can tell whether in relation to the displayed work week, it is to the left or the right, left in this case as the assignment for a Carpenter has a start date of 17th December 2020.

The Gantt view currently always starts with a Sunday and the grey areas are non-working time. This means that a one-hour work assignment shows as a thick line, but it is still enough to grab and hold the bar and move it horizontally to reposition the assignment. When you grab and hold an assignment you get two vertical parallel lines.

Work View Toolbar

The Work View Toolbar has the following elements:

I will go into more details on each of these in the last of the articles on the Graphical Work Week application but will show some of these in action as we go through some scenarios.

The Lock Durations is turned on by default, if you are moving a one-hour assignment to a different day you do not want to make the duration longer as you are trying to grab the thick line representing the assignment. The Filter row is also on by default, allowing you to filter in each column. As you are working within a small number of weeks it is more likely you will use Previous Week and Next Week rather than using the button “Select Date, and Jump to that Date in the Schedule”.

Selecting Work and Filtering Resources to Match

You can select a work assignment by either using the check box on the left-hand column or by double-clicking an assignment in the Gantt view. When you do so the row is highlighted, and the assignment bar gains a dotted blue line around it. In the Resource View resources that match to the assignments craft and crew type requirements are highlighted in two shades of turquoise, the darker shade indicates a perfect match.

If a work assignment is assigned, then the resource will gain a dotted red line around the cell where the assignment is made. That may not be so obvious if the resource does not belong to the first craft, and you would need to scroll vertically in the resource view to find it. I have used the toolbar button “Filter resources based on the selected work orders”, as the work assignment has already reached ASSIGNED status then this filters to GRANGER – Lou Granger who was the Labor assigned. You can see that on the 22nd December 2020 his availability has been reduced by the 4 hours of the assignment to leave 4 hours remaining.

Lou Granger has a default craft of CARP – Carpenter, and so the obvious assumption is that the work assignment was for a carpenter. Actually no, I know and anyone who was following the previous article would know that the requirement was for an ELECT – Electrician and GRANGER provides that capability as a secondary craft.

Using the button “Display menu to choose visible columns” we can see many fields which can be selected as columns on the left-hand side of the work view, but no Craft or Crew Type, as they are shared in the same Resource column. Unfortunately, this means that there is no way of knowing the underlying craft requirement of the assignment without navigating to the Work Order Tracking application or without using the Unassign action, an omission in this first release, surely!

RFE 147792 – GWW – Work View should include Craft column – has been raised.

For the second work assignment for one hour of craft CARP – Carpenter when we select the assignment the matched resources are highlighted. I have double-clicked the cell on 23rd December 2020 for GRANGER and the Assign Labor dialog opens for you to confirm. The Scheduled Start will be 07:00 at the start of the shift.

After I pressed OK the Status has changed to ASSIGNED, the assignment bar has moved to the start of 23rd December 2020 at 07:00 and Lou Granger now shows 7 hours of remaining availability on this day. GRANGER’s percentage allocation has increased from 10% to 13% as a result. The percentage allocation is a value for the whole work week, 5 hours allocated over 40 hours in this case, 12.5% rounded up to 13%.

A tooltip on the assignment bar can be displayed by using the Alt/Option key and a single-click.

Gantt View Assignment Menu

Each assignment bar has an action menu which can be found by using the Command key and a single-click (MacOS) or Shift+F10 (Windows), or the right-click mouse button. This menu changes depending on whether the bar represents an assignment or a work order or task without an assignment.

Move to Today – moves the assignment to the start of the shift for today, which results in the assignment starting on 22nd December 2020 at 07:00, which happens now to be in the past, the resource availability for GRANGER has been adjusted accordingly. An action which is useful for the second or third shifts in the day where today’s shift start may still be in the future.

Set Work to Day – Opens the calendar lookup allowing you to pick a date and time for the Scheduled Start, here I have picked 23rd December 2020. The result is that it has moved the assignment back to the start of the shift (07:00) on the 23-Dec-20.

Other Resource Availability – Opens a dialog to allow you to review the status of material and tool reservations. The two filters show a green status, the 1.0/74.0 indicates the requirement and availability from the requested storeroom. The Tool availability though shows red status of unavailable, the 1.0/0.0 indicates a requirement of one but none are available from the storeroom. Assets and Locations indicate whether the location or asset on the work order are available within their maintenance schedule, the periods defined for maintenance. There is no location or asset on work order 1314.

Create Assignment – This action effectively duplicates the current assignment, there is no dialog. The new assignment for a Carpenter is at WAITASGN status and has the same Scheduled Start Date as the assignment it was created from. It is an assignment for the same work order and/or task.

There is no ability to be able to create a new assignment for a particular craft or crew type, or to change the craft of an existing assignment.

RFE 147794 – GWW – There is no ability to be able to create a new assignment for a particular craft or crew type – has been raised.

Unassign – This action removes the Labor/Crew currently assigned to the assignment, changing the assignment status back to WAITASGN, the status changes colour to orange, and the resource column now displays the craft or crew type of the assignment.

Delete Assignment – Does exactly that. I’ve deleted the assignment which I had just created with the action Create Assignment.

Add/View Notes – This action shows the normal log note capability. I am creating a WORK type log note to say that the work could not be done today as the filter vacuum (Tool HEPAVAC) was not available, but it could be done tomorrow morning on the 23rd December 2020, the tool is expected to be returned to stores this afternoon.

After you press OK the log note symbol is shown beside the assignment that created it. Log notes are normally created for a class of work order or ticket, not an assignment. The WORKLOG table has an ASSIGNMENTID column, and so the log note will only appear against the appropriate assignment. If you click the icon it opens the View/Add Notes dialog.

The action Add/View Notes can be used to view existing log notes, these may exist even if they were not written directly against the assignment. This particular log note of type CLIENTNOTE will be seen on both assignments; it indicates to the client who raised the request that the work order has now been rescheduled to 23rd December 2020. The log note symbol has appeared against the second assignment although the log note is not specific to the assignment. It should only appear if it is linked to the assignment, this is a bit inconsistent, but I couldn’t reproduce it when IFIX004 was applied.

If the work view record represents a work order or a task, then the menu includes the actions:

The three missing actions are:

The first two are obvious why they are missing, if no assignment exists you cannot delete it or unassign the resource. The Create Assignment action is not needed as the work order or task can be turned into an assignment by selecting it and double clicking a resource.

We will see in another article that the action menu may sometimes have another option to do with merging a split assignment.

Work View Column Menus

There is an action menu on both the Work Order column and the Description column, the other columns share the same menu as for the Work Order but without the Go To actions. We’ll start with the action menu for the Work Order column.

Some of the actions can operate against multiple selected work orders.

Change Status – The change status action will change the work order status or the task status. It is not changing the assignment status. If the assignment is against the task it changes the task status. If the assignment is against the work order it changes the work order status, but then it may roll this status down to the tasks depending on the value of the “Inherit Status Changes” attribute on the task records.

The Change Status dialog that appears is the regular one for changing the work order or task status seen in other Maximo work order based applications. It may be used against a selected set of work order records. When this occurs the top field in the dialog is the New Status field.

There is no action for changing the assignment status, other than between WAITASGN and ASSIGNED. There is no change assignment status action, so it is not possible to Start, Interrupt or Complete an assignment as there is in the Assignment Manager application.

RFE 147796 – GWW – Start, Interrupt and Complete an assignment – was raised, but it was declined on the basis that the starting, stopping and completion of assignments would normally now be carried out on mobile devices.

Modify Work Details – This action can also be used against a selected set of work orders. It is restricted to modifying the Priority, Supervisor, Lead, Target Start and Target Finish, Work Group and Crew fields. The fields in the table window can be modified and then the OK button used to make the changes.

When multiple work orders have been selected the Mass Update fields are used, the existing values can be cleared. In this case the Apply button is used to perform the mass update.

Select Owner – This action allows you to select an Owner or Owner Group for the work order. The Persons tab selects an owner and an owning group. The Person Groups tab allows you to select a team as the owner group. The Open Work column is a count of the open work orders and tickets that the Person has to their name.

Ownership can be changed on multiple selected work orders.

View Item Availability – This is a read-only view of the availability of items and tools required by the work order. Additional tabs show balances of these items at bin level, purchase requests, purchase orders and contracts that reference the items on the work order, alternate items and the storeroom reservations being made for the items and tools requested.

The action can only be used against one work order and not multiple selected work assignments, the action will be hidden if multiple rows are selected.

Refresh Selected Work Records – This action has no dialog and refetches data from the database for the selected work order/assignment records. If no records are selected, you will receive the message “No work records selected.”.

Reschedule/Unassign Assignments – This action changes the Scheduled Start Date of the selected work orders/assignments when “Reschedule the assignments?” is checked. The new Scheduled Start Date will be that selected in the Reschedule Date field.

Note. If no records are selected, then all assignments for the current active work order or task will be moved to the Reschedule Date. For example, if the top assignment was active then both assignments would move to the new scheduled start date because both assignments in this example belong to work order 1314 with no task referenced.

Although both assignments are initially moved to 24-December-2020 at 07:00, as both assignments are to be fulfilled by GRANGER – Lou Granger, then the second assignment will be moved to start after the first assignment has completed, i.e., it will now start at 11:00.

The second aspect of the Reschedule/Unassign Assignments action is to unassign the assignments that have been selected, this is achieved by deselecting the checkbox “Reschedule the assignments?”. Both assignments are being unassigned, and the Scheduled Start Date is being reset to 23-December 2020 at 07:00.

When the assignments have been unassigned you will receive the informational message “BMXAA9541I – All assignments have been successfully unassigned.”. Both assignments are now at WAITASGN status and the Scheduled Start Date is 23-December-2020 07:00 as specified. The Resource column still shows Lou Granger but using the Refresh Work List action will correct this to Electrician and Carpenter. In the Resource View you can see that there is a requirement for 1 hour of a Carpenter 1.00/40.00 and 4 hours of an Electrician 4.00/40.00. You should not need to use Refresh Work List action after performing this action, the issue has been reported to IBM Support.

Incidentally, this action is reviewed in more detail in the 5th article – Graphical Work Week – Assignments.

Go To Work Order Tracking, Go To Quick Reporting, Go To Activities and Tasks – These actions will navigate you to the chosen application and launch the work order which is in focus. If you have clones of WOTRACK and QUICKREP applications and access to these applications, perhaps they are clones in the Industry Solutions, then they will also be shown in the action menu. For example, Work Order Tracking (Oil) and Quick Reporting (Oil).

When a record references a task, you can navigate to all three applications. The Go To Activities and Tasks action is not available if the task field has no value.

Work View Description Menu

If you right-click on the description field, then you will have the following actions if the record is a work assignment:

As previously referenced the Create Assignment, Unassign and Delete Assignment actions are not available if the work record represents a work order or task rather than an assignment.

If you select multiple work orders/assignments, then right-click on the description field, you will have the following actions:

Work Order Constraints

When a work order has constraint dates, a Start No Earlier Than and/or a Finish No Later Than, then these will be visible in the Gantt view.

The Start No Earlier Than date is displayed as a solid thin red line, it is on 21st December 2020 at 07:00. The Finish No Later Than date is displayed as a solid thick red line, it is on 23rd December 2020 at 18:00.

The Start Date and End Date have inline editing, so I will change the Carpenter assignment to start on 24/12/20 07:00. The two constraint dates do not have inline editing.

Two things will have changed:

The tooltip on the bar in the Gantt view can be opened using the key stroke Alt/Option-Click, it shows the Validation – “This work is scheduled outside its schedule window.” The tooltip is also extended with the two constraint dates.

I’ve added task 10 to work order 1314, a “Preparation Activity”. The two constraint lines are also shown for the task, although if you navigate to the Activities and Tasks application they are not written to the database. The work order’s constraints are inferred to apply to its tasks and assignments.

The task is drawn from the work order’s Scheduled Start to its Scheduled Finish irrespective of the task’s duration which you can see was set as 0:00.

As the Scheduled Start is after the FNL constraint date then it is coloured red and the description background is yellow. Its tool tip has the same validation message.

The Status column shows both the work order or task status, and the assignment status, this will be the next topic.

Work View Status Column

As we saw the work view status column shows both a work order or task status as well as an assignment status.

System Properties are used to define the colours used. The default values for work order or task statuses are:

System Properties are used to define the colours used. The default values for assignment statuses are:

In order to show some of the different colours for the assignment status I have used the Assignment Manager application to assign the Electrician assignment to HORN – Christine Horn for 4 hours on 23-December-2020 07:00, I then Started and Completed the assignment, the assignment status shows COMPLETE and has a background colour of grey. I also assigned GRANGER – Lou Granger to the CARP – Carpenter assignment for 1 hour starting at 11:00 on the 23rd December, changing assignment status to STARTED, a green background colour.

While HORN – Christine Horn has a completed assignment of 4 hours on the 23-December-2020 her availability shows 8 hours. This is consistent with the Assignment Manager application, historical work days, 23/12/20 is now in the past, show the number of available hours in the shift rather than 0:00. This is not normally a problem as you are most often using the Graphical Work Week application to schedule next week’s work.

The Graphical Work Week application does not currently allow you to expedite the progress of work assignments as you can do in the Assignment Manager application. You cannot Start, Interrupt or Complete assignments, and so it cannot be used in dispatching scenarios, nor can it be considered a replacement for the Assignment Manager application.

The preparation task was moved to start on the 22nd December 2020 07:00. As this is in the past, the task was automatically changed to a status of INPRG – In Progress. This is a task with no assignment, the Resources column is empty.

Work Orders and Tasks with no Assignments

I’ve included work order 1317 with no tasks, planned labor or assignments. Work orders and tasks with no assignments that meet the criteria for being selected according to the Start Date, End Date and work queries will be displayed. This is so that you can create assignments for them in the Graphical Work Week application.

If you are used to the Graphical Assignment application, then one thing that you will notice is that the Description field has no indentation to indicate the level of work order, task or assignment. A work order with one task and one assignment is also displayed in a single row, rather than multiple rows. You needed the multiple rows in the Graphical Assignment application to allow you to create precedence logic between work orders or tasks, something which you cannot do in the Graphical Work Week application.

The spanner icon in the description serves no purpose, it is a hangover from the Graphical Assignment application where there were different icons to distinguish the levels. I think most users would prefer to regain the lost horizontal space and ditch the spanner.

RFE 147831 – GWW – No need for Spanner icon in Description field.

If you want to create an assignment for work order 1317, you select it and then double-click in a cell with the resource. In this case I double-clicked MURPHY – Lee Murphy on 23-December-2020. The Scheduled Start is moved to the first available time, which is time now on 24-December-2020 11:29.

The Assign Labor dialog is read-only, you do not have the ability to define a Craft or Skill Level, and then make the assignment based on using a secondary craft, the assignments are only made based on the default craft of the selected Labor. It is possible to assign based on a secondary craft by the convoluted method of:

Tasks are included in the set of work records in case you wish to create an assignment for it. If you do not wish to include tasks for a work order then in the Work Order Tracking application the “Include Tasks in Schedule” checkbox must not be set, the default is for tasks to be included in schedules.

Attributes of Interest

There are a few attributes that are worth a mention as they can be used for filtering:

I’ve added three additional work orders 1318, 1319 and 1320 with different priorities. It is the WOPRIORITY attribute, which is being used, the one with a range of 0-999 where 999 is the highest, although I would restrict to between 0 to 10 in most client situations. Notice when the duration of a work order is 0:00 the symbol is an orange diamond. If you try to select it the diamond grows in size making it easier to select.

I’ve also dragged the Work Priority field into view next to the Status field. As you can see unassigned work orders and tasks have a coloured work priority field. Assigned work orders and tasks have no priority colouring, I think this is a pity, by the time you have assigned everything it is difficult to see your high priority work orders as by then there is no colours in the priority field.

RFE 147833 – GWW – Work Priority column to retain background colour after you have assigned labor or crew.

System Properties are used to define the colours used. The default values for work order or task work priorities are:

If the Work Priority is zero or null, then there will be no background colour.

There is another System Property skd.usestatuscolors which by default is set to “true”. I’ve changed the duration of work order 1318 to 5:00 hours so that it is easier to see what this property is doing. The work order bars for work orders and tasks without assignments are now being coloured by work priority instead of status. You can see this more clearly by looking at work order 1318 or work order 1314 and task 10, both of which have no Resources value, no assignment. Assignments are all coloured grey irrespective of the assignment status. when this property is set to “false”.

I think it best to leave this property set to “true” and so I’ll change it back. As the priority field is coloured, I don’t think we need to align the bars with it. I’m also thinking that the priority colour might work best using a set of rainbow colours with red as the highest priority.

Assigning with Skill Level

You cannot change an existing assignment; you have to first use the Unassign action and then make the assignment by selecting the Work View record and double clicking the labor you want to reassign to the work.

In this case, for work order 1317, I have used the Unassign action and I have chosen Mike Small – SMALL on the 25-December-2020. The Assign Labor dialog opens with a warning in red text “You are assigning the work to a resource that does not match the work requirements.”

When the OK button has been used the assignment is made. The description field now has the yellow background to indicate a validation error and the assignment’s bar is coloured red.

The validations for scheduled dates outside of the schedule constraints window is maintained after you refetch the work orders, however a mismatch in the skill level of the assignment is not maintained after you refetch the work orders.

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