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Graphical Work Week – Resource View

This is the fourth 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 Resource View, the lower of the two panes on the Graphical View tab.

It is now 4th January 2021, happy new year.

We are picking up the Work List WW004 from the previous article. The first thing I have had to do is extend the End Date to 10/01/21 00:00. Previously the End Date was 31/12/20, if I tried to make an assignment the assignment could only occur now or in the future, but the scheduled start date would then be outside of the Start/End period of the Work List, and the work order would disappear if you refreshed the work list.

The Resource View is the lower pane of the Graphical View tab. It shows the craft and crew types required by the work orders in the work view, the upper pane. The labour records that are on the same calendar and one of the shifts as that defined for the Work List are displayed below the craft record representing their default craft. The crews are positioned below their crew type.

The Restrict Resource Availability in the Work List WW004 only selects labor records where they have a work location of NEEDHAM in the BEDFORD site. There are 10 crafts represented across 30 labor records which have a calendar/shift of DAY/DAY and with the NEEDHAM work location, but only those belonging to the CARP and ELECT crafts are shown, this is because those are the only resource requirements in the list of work orders.

Here is another Work List WW006 with just one work order 1321 which has no planned labor or assignment records. There are no resources to be able to make an assignment.

It is the set of work orders which determines the resources that are displayed. You cannot use the Graphical Work Week application to create your assignments as you can do from the Assignments tab of the Work Order Tracking application or from the Assignment Manager application. When using the Graphical Work Week application, you do need work orders that have been planned with the craft or crew types, or at least enough planned work orders that means that the craft or crew types are referenced at least once for the labor and crews that you wish to assign to work.

It would be useful if the Graphical Work Week application had an option to allow you to define the labor and crews that you wished to include in the Graphical View – Resource View, so that there were a consistent set of resources for you to assign to work, one that wouldn’t change depending on which work orders or assignments met the work query criteria. I had created two RFE’s 147847 and 147848, but they were declined as there was an existing one that should meet these needs.

RFE 147315 Scheduler – Graphical Work Week – Ability to preview all labor in assigned shop

Resource View Toolbar

The Resource 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.

Collapse/Expand all rows – The Collapse all rows button just shows the craft and crew types and not the labor or crew records.

It is a likely scenario that when you first bring in the set of work orders to assign there will be some craft or crew types that are overloaded according to their current schedule dates. By using the Collapse all rows button, you only show the craft and crew types allowing you to focus in on the records where load is greater than availability.

To illustrate, in Work Order Tracking application I have created an assignment for 4 hours of craft PLUMB – Plumber, for each of the three work orders 1318, 1319 and 1320. I have also set the schedule start date of the three work orders to tomorrow 05-January-2021 at 07:00. I have also fixed the data so that there is only one plumber with a work location of NEEDHAM in BEDFORD site.

The PLUMB cell for 05-January-2021 is now showing in red text on a white background 12:00/8:00, a requirement for 12 hours but an availability of only 8 hours.

Notice the Work Priority colour coding disappears when there is a work assignment, a pity as you will still be moving the lower priority work orders to another date.

Using the assignment bar action Set Work to Day, I have moved the assignment for low priority work order 1320 to 06-January-2021 and the over allocation is now resolved. The load/availability of the PLUMB craft is now 8:00/8:00 on 05-January-2021, hence blue text on a light blue background.

If you are assigning work for one craft at a time, then after you have used “Collapse all rows” button then you can expand/collapse one craft at a time using the +/- button in the Description field.

Filter work orders based on the selected resources – When selected the toolbar button turns green and the work list is filtered to the assignments that match the selected resource, in this case the PLUMB craft. The three assignments on work orders 1318, 1319 and 1320 meet the filter criteria, which will allow you to focus in on the assignment of a Labor resource.

We want to select our only plumber resource, BRO – Bryan Rose, to the three work assignments. You can do this by selecting all work assignments and then double clicking in the first cell when you want to start the assignments, in this case 05-January-2021 for the resource BRO.

The result is that the three work assignments are now at ASSIGNED status with Bryan Rose as the Resource. The second work assignment for work order 1319 was moved to start at 11:00 after the assignment on work order 1318 is due to complete, its 4 work hours would be allocated between 07:00 and 11:00 on 05-January-2021. Therefore, the action of assigning multiple work assignments to the resource will move the schedule dates so that the resource is not overloaded on any work day.

The BRO Labor resource for Bryan Rose now shows 30% resource allocation, 12 hours assigned from 40 available. No hours are available on 05-January-2021 and the cell is changed to a white background. There are 4 hours of availability remaining for BRO on 06-January-2021.

You might have noticed that I had deselected the “Filter work orders based on the selected resources”, this is because with PLUMB craft selected, there would have been no remaining work orders and hence nothing would have been shown in the work view (top pane).

If you use the “Filter work orders based on the selected resources” button with a Labor row selected it will filter the work assignments to that resource. This also works if multiple resources are selected, it will show all of their work assignments. Note. If an unexpected additional labor resource is shown in the Resources column on the work view (top pane) it is probably because they are selected on a collapsed craft, their default craft, resources can be selected and then the – button used to collapse the craft.

Modify Availability

The two selection boxes at the end of the Resource View toolbar are used for making periods of unavailability or additional periods of availability – terms referred to as Modified Availability.

BRO – Bryan Rose had called in Sick today, 04-January-2021. The Reason Code of SICK was selected, and the Availability Type was left as Full Day, I then double-clicked the cell for BRO for today and its availability is reduced to 0:00 and background colour changed to match that for the reason code of SICK. The reason code is blanked afterward, but I had reselected it for the screenshot.

The Percentage Allocation is now 38% which is the load (12 hours) divided by the available hours (40-8=32) and rounded up. Note, the calculation was not 50%, 12 work hours + 8 sick hours divided by the 40 hours of availability in a week. Note. When this screenshot was made IFIX003 was applied and there were changes to the calculation of percentage allocation in IFIX004.

When the Availability Type is changed to Partial Day then double-clicking a cell will open the Modify Availability dialog. Here I changed the Start Time to 13:00 and the Hours was recalculated to 2:00 for a meeting, reason code MEET, that Bryan needs to attend on 07-January-2021 for a project work order assignment he will start on the Friday.

After using the OK button on the Modify Availability dialog the cell for 07-January-2021 shows partial availability with a triangle coloured according to the reason code for the modified availability, meeting is green. The available hours have been reduced to 6:00 because meetings are referenced as a NON-WORK reason code, that reduces availability.

Percentage Allocation is now at 40% for BRO – Bryan Rose, 12 hours assigned to work from availability of 30 hours, 40 shift hours minus 8 hours sick, 2 hours meeting.

You can create additional work hours by selecting the reason code of EXTRA TIME. I double-clicked Saturday 09th January 2021 as Bryan has agreed to work part of the weekend. In this case, the Modify Availability dialog opens, the Start Time and End Time are blank as it is a non-working day in the shift, I added 07:00 and 15:00 respectively and the Hours was calculated as 8:00.

After the Modify Availability dialog closes, the 09-January-2021 cell is now shown with a background of green, a working day, and the extra time of modified availability is indicated with an orange triangle. Notice that the load/availability for the PLUMB craft on 09-January-2021 has also been modified to 0:00/8:00 and the background colour has changed to blue, a date with availability.

Percentage Allocation is now at 32% for BRO – Bryan Rose, 12 hours assigned to work from availability of 38 hours, 40 shift hours, plus 8 hours of extra time, minus 8 hours sick, and 2 hours of meetings.

The Modify Availability can also be applied to a whole week, with the Availability Type of Full Week. The availability can be modified for multiple Labor or Crews at the same time by selecting the resources. The modified availability can be removed by selecting a Reason Code of Remove. You cannot change the Reason Code on an existing period of unavailability from one of the cells, you will need to remove it and reapply it with the new reason code. Note. It is possible to change it by using the action Modify Person Availability from the menu in one of the columns in the Resource View.

The Modify Availability capability of the Graphical Work Week is working as it is on the Graphical Resource View application. I have already written about this in three articles, the first of which provides illustrations on how to make and remove periods of unavailability for Labor resources, you can find it here: http://maximosecrets.com/2020/10/20/graphical-resource-view-1-labor/. The second article has a focus on Crews, but it does cover ground which was too much to fit into the first article, you can find it here: http://maximosecrets.com/2020/11/19/graphical-resource-view-2-crews/. The third article is a mixed bag, going deeper into the toolbar settings and configuration some of which is relevant also for Graphical Work Week, you can find it here: http://maximosecrets.com/2020/11/24/graphical-resource-view-3-miscellaneous/. Together there are nearly 40 pages, too much to repeat in this article.

View External Assignments

Sometimes you might find that there is a calendar icon in one or more cells for a resource. If you use the right click action to find the cell menu there will be an option called View External Assignments. There is a calendar icon for BRO – Bryan Rose on both 08th and 09th January 2021, the availability in both cases has been reduced to 0:00, a total of 16 hours work. Note. With Maximo 7.6.1.2 and IFIX004 or later applied the calendar icon is also used to signal the cell menu action Adjust Crew Assignments.

Percentage Allocation is now at 55% for BRO – Bryan Rose, I think this is incorrect and I have raised a Support case with IBM. There are now 28 hours of assigned work from availability of 38 hours, 40 shift hours, plus 8 hours of extra time, minus 8 hours sick, and 2 hours of meetings, and so my calculation for percentage allocation would be (28/38)*100 = 73.68 or 74%. If you included the external work order in a new work query for the work list, that is the figure you would receive. It is also the figure shown in the Assignment Manager application if you set the work week to start on Sunday 3rd January 2021.

After discussing this with IBM the current method in IFIX003 is to exclude the hours for external assignments first, not to include external assignments as part of the load. Availability is therefore reduced to 32 hours before reducing it further by the 8 hours of sick and 2 hours of meeting to 22 hours. Load on internal assignments is 12 hours. 12/22 provides the 55%. I am expecting a change so that the percentage allocation is based on including external assignments so that it aligns with the Assignment Manager calculation, this should also take into account time the labor is allocated to a crew, which could be considered a type of external assignment.

Postscript – With IFIX004 installed a labor that is also assigned to a crew is highlighted with the same calendar icon used for External Assignments. As part of this functionality IBM reviewed the calculation of the percentage allocation and concluded that it should include external assignments (crew might be considered a type of external assignment) as part of the load for a labor resource. The calculation is now aligned with that in Assignment Manager.

You would have noticed that the Percentage Allocation has a light green background colour, this will be discussed in the next topic of this article.

The menu option View External Assignments opens a dialog showing the external assignments for the week. The table window details show a few additional fields including the fields for Appointment Required and Appointment Made, all fields are read-only. You cannot navigate to the external work order which is a pity.

RFE 147850 GWW – View External Assignments should provide the ability to navigate to the work order, has been raised.

Percentage Allocation

As we saw in the previous sections the Allocation column in the Resource View is recalculated as you make or remove assignments or make modifications to availability for the labor, it also works for crews. The percentage allocation is the hours assigned divided by hours available. From IFIX004 onwards the hours assigned include external assignments, which are assignments made to work orders or tasks that are not included in the work queries of the Work List. The available hours are the shift hours for the work week taking into account any modified availability, non-work reason codes reduce the availability, work reason codes increase the availability.

The Percentage Allocation field has a background colour which is managed by two System Properties.

The system property skd.gww.allocation.thresholds are the points at which exceeding this value will cause the background colour changes; 0%, 50%, 75% and 100%. The system property skd.gww.allocation.colors are the Hexadecimal colours associated with each threshold. Notice, this system property starts with a comma, meaning that there is no background colour until the 50% allocation threshold has been exceeded.

The result of these two system properties on the background colour of the Percentage Allocation is therefore:

I did tests at exactly 50%, 75% and 100% and confirmed that it isn’t until these values have been exceeded does the background colour change. When the percentage allocation is exactly 100% the colour will remain as dark green, it is only when the percentage allocation exceeds 100% does it become red; red to indicate an overloaded condition for the week.

Overallocated Resources

In Maximo it is possible to over allocate a labor or crew on a particular workday. I have created a new work order 1322 – Overload BRO with too much work, with a PLUMB craft assignment that I have scheduled to BRO – Bryan Rose on the 08 January 2021. He now has 12 hours of work assignments on this day and availability is 8 hours, hence he is showing as -4:00 hours on 08/01/21. The Percentage Allocation in Assignment Manager is showing 84%, 32 hours allocated with 38 hours available.

Note. That the colour coding used in Assignment Manager is not the same as that found in the Graphical Work Week application. If you are using both applications, you might consider aligning the colours in Assignment Manager to the Percentage Allocation colours in Graphical Work Week. This would remove the Yellow text, which is difficult to see, although light green is only marginally better as a text colour.

The 08 January 2021 in the Graphical Work Week application, it also shows as – 4:00, overallocated by 4 hours, and conveniently shown in red text to highlight an issue that ought to be corrected.

The menu option View External Assignments opens a dialog showing the three assignments, two of which occur on the 08 January 2021. We already know we cannot navigate to the Work Order Tracking application where we might correct one of the assignments causing the overload.

At the Craft level PLUMB – Plumber is also highlighted in red text 0:00/-4:00. If this figure represents load/availability, I was expecting to see 12:00/8:00, 12 hours of load and 8 hours available, but all these assignments are external. We’ll include work order 1322 in the Work List query to see what difference this makes.

The Graphical Work Week application still shows that BRO – Bryan Rose is overallocated on 08 January 2020 by 4 hours, a negative value in red text. The PLUMB craft is now showing 4:00/0:00 in red text. The 4:00 hours of load is the total load of the included work orders of the work list. The 0:00 hours of availability is the amount of availability remaining to be allocated having deducted from the normal shift availability any modified availability and external work assignments.

Perhaps a better phrase for this is then “Work List Load / Remaining Availability” rather than just “Load / Availability”. The load of included work list work orders and the remaining availability to satisfy that work list load. 

Notice by including work order 1322 in the Work List queries it moves from external assignments to internal assignments, the percentage allocation changed from 67% to 73%. I do not believe the percentage allocation should be affected by whether the assignments are included or excluded from the work list, and I believe IBM now agrees with this, fixed in IFIX004.

Unassign All

Another cell menu option is the Unassign All. On the 06 January 2021 there are 4 hours of remaining availability for BRO – Bryan Rose. He is currently assigned to work order 1320 for 4:00 hours.

After using the Unassign All menu option, work order 1320 is now back to WAITASGN status and the resource column shows the craft – Plumber. There is no dialog for unassigning the one assignment. There is no change to the value for the PLUMB craft it is still 4:00/8:00, the work list load is 4:00 and the available hours for the work list is 8:00.

What would happen if I used Unassign All for BRO – Bryan Rose on Tuesday 05 January 2021?

It unassigns all the work orders on this day. The Unassign All unassigned both work order 1318 and 1319, they were both returned to WAITASGN status, there is no associated dialog or message asking for confirmation, it does what it says on the label.

As today and time now is after the end of the DAY shift on Tuesday 05th January, I’ve remade the assignments for work order 1318, 1319 and 1320 but one day later.

You can unassign one or multiple assignments rather than all assignments by selecting them in the Gantt display of the Work View (upper pane) and using the Unassign menu option. You do not get a dialog here either.

Unfortunately using the Unassign All on Friday 08th January when there is one included assignment and one external assignment results in the “BMXAA4214E – An unknown error…” message. This has been reported to IBM Support.

Resource View Columns

The Resource View rows show Craft and Labor, Crew Types and Crews. The columns that you display will be dependent on whether you are using Crews.

The toolbar button Displays menu to choose visible columns opens a dialog where you only have control over a few fields as most are read-only:

I was surprised to see Skill Level, Shift and Crew Work Group as being selected and made read-only. Some Maximo clients do not use Skill Levels or Crews and the calendar may only have one shift, and so perhaps you do not need a reminder of it if all rows are populated with the same value. This has been reported to IBM Support to allow these columns to be hidden.

Default Vendor, Crew Assignment, Work Location and Work Zone are fields found in the Graphical Assignment application and would be useful in Graphical Work Week to select and filter on. The Supervisor field should also be included as if you are going to use a labor based on secondary craft or a different work location you may need to contact the supervisor of that labor.

RFE 147867 – GWW – Additional Resource Columns, has been raised

Resource View Menus

There are Right Click menus on the Resource View columns as follows, the asterisk means that the menu option can act on multiple selected records:

For other fields on the Labor and Crew rows you will get the same menu but without the Go To option, for example the Description field.

View Craft/Skill/Work Zone

I’ve added a secondary craft to BRO – Bryan Rose, he can also perform some electrical work. His default craft is PLUMB – Plumber, and you will find him under that craft in the Resource View. In the Description column you can now see a blue icon to indicate that Bryan Rose has secondary craft skills.

The View Craft/Skill/Work Zone dialog also shows the Qualifications including qualification status, and which work zones Bryan can work in, NEMA is his default work zone.

Modify Person Availability

While the Graphical Work Week application gives you the ability to create and remove modified availability records, it doesn’t allow you to change them. The Modify Person Availability menu option would allow you to change the reason code, or to move a meeting or holiday from one day to another.

When the Modify Person Availability dialog opens it displays the working days for the next week including today, it ignores the non-working days, in the DAY/DAY calendar/shift this is Saturday and Sunday. It then shows the modified availability records for this week. While at the time of writing, today was Tuesday 05th January, I changed the Display From field to include Monday (04/01/21) where the sick day occurred, so that it aligned with the Graphical Work Week display. It would be a nice feature if this dialog passed the current display week from the Graphical View to the Display From field.

I did test changing the meeting from the Thursday to Wednesday and on closing the dialog everything was calculated correctly in the Resource View, the cell on Wed/06 for BRO became -2:00 in red text. After checking this I moved the meeting back to the Thursday.

View Assigned Work

Unlike the Modified Person Availability dialog, the View Assigned Work dialog does default to the current Graphical View week. It is a display of the assignments for this week. It would be more useful to have this displayed by Scheduled Start rather than work order number, and to be able to sort on other columns.

You might ask why this menu option is needed when you can use the toolbar button Filter work orders based on the selected resources. The answer is that the dialog shows both internal work assignments and the external work assignments, the top two for work order 1300 are the two external assignments. A checkbox “External?” in the table window would be useful.

RFE 147868 – View Assigned Work enhancements, has been raised.

If you have multiple selected resources, the View Assigned Work menu option will appear, but the dialog will not display. The design of the dialog means that it is only appropriate for one labor record. The issue has been reported to IBM Support.

Crew Assignment

I have created a Crew Type of HOMEINT for a housing snagging team, made up with the three crafts Plumber, Carpenter and Electrician. I have then created a crew HOMEINT1 based on this crew type for the NEMA work zone. BRO – Bryan Rose, HORN – Christine Horn, and MURPHY – Lee Murphy will form this crew next week on 11 January 2021 and will finish at the end of the week on Friday 15 January 2021 at the shift end 15:00.

The Crew Assignment menu option opens a dialog with no Start Date or End Date, I have added the start and end of January and used the Refresh button to see that BRO – Bryan Rose is on the HOMEINT1 crew next week.

Unfortunately, when I go to the same dialog to check MURPHY or HORN the Start Date and End Date have to be re-entered, but the same reference to crew HOMEINT1 will be found.

RFE 147870 – GWW Default Crew Assignment dates, has been raised.

I have extended the Work List End Date to 17 January 2021 which will cover the period when BRO, HORN and MURPHY are on the crew, and then used the Refresh Work List action.

For BRO – Bryan Rose when I have navigated to the week starting Sunday 10th January 2021 there is an External Assignment on Monday 11th January and the menu option View External Assignments shows one labor assignment to work order 1300, but it does not show or take into account in the availability that Bryan is assigned to a crew during this work week. Note. With IFIX004 applied the availability becomes -4:00 because it does now take into account the labor assignment to a crew. I will go into this more in the next article.

Notice the Percentage Allocation of 0% is not taking into account either the external assignment or the assignment onto the crew.

In the application up to and including IFIX003 there is no warning when you add a period of unavailability during the week when BRO is assigned to the crew, in this case I added a Full Day HOLIDAY by double-clicking the cell of Wed/13 for BRO, the availability was reduced to 0:00 for this day. From IFIX004 the availability of the labor assignment onto the crew is taken into account and would show an availability of 0:00. An icon in the cell will also be displayed, it is called Adjust Crew Assignments. Both of these points will alert you to make other arrangements before giving Bryan his day’s holiday.

The four work orders for the HOMEINT1 crew, work orders 1323-1326, have now been included in the Work List and hence the HOMEINT crew type and HOMEINT1 crew are displayed in the Resource View. Currently all four work orders have been scheduled into the week of 11th January 2021, but no attempt has been made to schedule them for each day. The work load for the crew is 38:00 hours, the total work hours for the crew with 3 labor assigned will be 114 hours (3×38).

With the crew included in the Work List it did not make any difference to the availability of BRO – Bryan Rose, I didn’t think it would.

With no external assignments for the crew the percentage allocation is calculated correctly at 95%, 38 hours load from 40 hours available. Notice the change of background colour to the darker green. Notice also the vertical scroll bar appearing in the Gantt display of the Work View (upper pane).

View Crew Type/Crew Work Group/Work Zone

The View Crew Type/Crew Work Group/Work Zone menu option opens a dialog that is only really useful for checking the Work Zones, the Crew Type and Crew Work Group appearing as either a resource or one of the columns in the Resource View.

The Modify Crew Availability menu option works similarly to the Modify Person Availability and the View Assigned Work menu option for the crew, while a different dialog, it does look very similar to the one for labor with the same name.

Export to Calendar

The Export to Calendar menu option is a method for adding the work assignments to your calendar application, in my case the Calendar application that comes with MacOS Operating System.

When the menu option is chosen for a single Labor resource, BRO – Bryan Rose, a dialog opens with three fields:

I have chosen a Start Date of 03 January 2021, 7 days and the File Download method.

A second dialog opens called Exported Calendars with a table window with columns for Project Name, Resource Name, Create Date and a download button.

Using the Download button on a Mac automatically opens the downloaded BRO.ics file in the Calendar application and starts the Import process allowing you to choose the calendar to add the new events to.

The assignments for the week are loaded, 6 assignments in all, including both the internal and external assignments. As I ran this when one of the calendar events was current, I received a notification for it, see top right of screen. There is no ability to Accept or Decline the Calendar invites, they are just loaded.

Notice the Resource Name – Bryan Rose is in the middle of the invite. When I checked the invite later it was not there, maybe because Bryan Rose isn’t a name recognised in my contacts perhaps. This will be worth some investigation later.

If you Export to Calendar a subsequent time for the same assignments and the calendar events already exist then the import of the new calendar file will be ignored for existing calendar events, even if their Scheduled Start has changed.

The format for the calendar event is defined in a Communication Template called EXPORTASSIGN – Template used to export Labor/Crew Assignments, which is based on the ASSIGNMENT object, the Applies To attribute.

The top of the calendar event looks as if it will also show the task number, between the work order number and its description.

The body of the message:

The message body could be modified. For example, if you do not use crews in your organization you could easily remove the Crew and Crew Type attributes. Ideally there would be two communication templates depending on the context, one for Labor and one for Crews.

RFE 147873 – GWW Calendar Export, control over communication template to use, has been raised.

RFE 147877 – GWW Calendar Export, control over log note to use and add long description to Communication Template, has been raised.

When using the E-mail method rather than the File Download method there are two System Properties used for the subject and body of the email that has the calendar file as an attachment:

When you use the Export to Calendar menu option with multiple selected labor then one calendar file is created for each resource and the Download All button appears. The Download All button will create a folder with the files in your Download directory.

The Export to Calendar menu option also works for a crew.

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