Last Updated on January 3, 2023 by maximosecrets

Good morning and welcome to Maximo Bite Size, a podcast on the functionality of Maximo Manage. Today is the third episode in the series on Maintenance Planning and we will be discussing Crew Types, Crews and Crew Work Groups.

A crew is where more than one-person works together on a regular basis. You use a crew to make it easier to plan work for a crew rather than plan for people individually. If there are multiple crews with the same make up of skills, then these crews belong to a crew type where the make-up of skills is defined. You cannot have a crew without a crew type so this is where we will start.

Crew Types

A Crew Type is a template for a Crew. Work is planned with Crew Types and Crews are assigned to work to match the Crew Type requirements. Think of this is in the same way you assign work to Labor to match the Craft requirements.

Crew Types are defined at the Organization level and have a simple status of ACTIVE or INACTIVE, with a new crew type being defined as active. You define a set of positions and the craft and/or skill level required for the crew position. Before starting out with crews you will need to define a set of positions in an ALN domain called AMCREWPOSITION. Examples of a crew position for a utility crew might be Driver, Leader, Worker, Helper, or for a two-person electric crew, it might be Linesman1, Linesman2.

For each position you define the craft and/or skill level, vendor, or labor rate contract, you are picking a craft rate record for the crew position. The hourly rate of each craft rate record selected is added together to form the Hourly Rate for the Crew Type, you can use the Override Hourly Rate field to set a different value.

You may also define the Required Tools for the crew type, there is no quantity field. You must enter a Tool Sequence, so that multiple tools of the same type can be entered as separate records. For example, the utility crew type will always take a pair of traffic lights with them, and these are entered as SIGNAL1 and SIGNAL2 in the Tool Sequence field, a label.

If the Tool had a Required Qualification, a qualification needed by one of the crew members to be able to use the tool, then this will appear in the Required Qualifications table. Additional qualifications can be entered for the crew, these might be specific to a crew position. You might give a quantity, for example two persons need to have a specific qualification.

While a tool item can have an hourly rate, this hourly rate is not added to the Crew Type Hourly Rate, perhaps one reason why you may wish to use the Override Hourly Rate field.

Crews

When you create a Crew, you must specify the Crew Type and the Required Crafts, Required Tools and Required Qualifications are copied from the crew type to the crew. Thereafter, there is no update from the crew type. You can add, change, and remove the crew requirements, adding new tools or qualifications or deleting one crew position and its craft and replacing it with another craft for the same crew position.

What you can change may be dependent on whether you have started to assign labor to crew positions, referred to as Labor Assignments, or have made Tool Assignments. More on these assignments in a while. Before you get to that point the crew will need to be at ACTIVE state rather than INACTIVE.

You will probably define a Work SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More and Work LocationA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More, the depot where the crew works. The crew may be crewed with a vendor team, who may, or may not be working under a Labor Rate Contract. A crew will certainly need a Calendar and Shift and you use the Modify Crew Availability action to define the availability of the crew, much in the same way as you do for Labor through the Modify Person Availability action in the People application. Crew Availability can be controlled graphically using the Graphical Resource View application, a part of Maximo Scheduler.

On the Labor Assignments tab, you assign labor to crew positions matching by the craft and/or skill requirements. The labor assignments are made from an Effective Date, a date/time field that you should set to the start time of the shift and a date when there is calendar availability for the crew. In a similar manner on the Tool Assignments tab, you assign tool assets to each tool sequence from an Effective Date. Normally the End Date of the labor and tool assignments is left empty, the labor and tools are assigned during the availability of the crew until a point when they must be changed. Labor should have the same calendar/shift as the crew, otherwise they won’t be available at times when the crew is.

The Crew Assignment Status action tells you whether the labor and tool assignments meet all the requirements of the crew. You can review the status as of a particular date.

If all the Required Craft positions have been met, then the requirement status will be set to OK. But there are four other statuses:

• REQ NOT MET – Assigned labor does not meet the requirements for the position
• NOT AVAILABLE – Assigned labor is not available during the shift, or there is a shift mismatch, or labor is assigned to other work orders
• NOT ASSIGNED – No labor assigned
• MULTIPLE – Multiple labor assigned to the same position with overlapping times

If all the Required Tools have been met, then the requirement status will be set to OK. But there are also the same four other statuses:

• NOT ASSIGNED – No Tool Assigned
• NOT AVAILABLE – Assigned tools are not available during the shift
• MULTIPLE – Multiple assets assigned to tool sequence with overlapping times
• REQ NOT MET – Requirement Not Met

For Required Qualifications the requirement status is either OK or NOT QUALIFIED. There are three articles on Maximo Secrets covering the Crew Assignment Status action, you’ll be able to find them in the Links section in the transcript.

You can make permanent or temporary replacements of a crew member by creating a new labor assignment with an effective date. You’ll get a warning and if you answer Yes, it is a permanent replacement, No is a temporary replacement, or you can cancel. The original labor assignment for the position will now have an end date the same as the effective date. For a temporary replacement there will be three labor assignments as the replacement is only in place for one day on the effective date and they have an end date the following day and start of shift. The original labor assignment has a new labor assignment that starts when the temporary replacement ends. Maximo ensures that the labor assignments do not overlap.

The New Unrestricted Row buttons are useful for temporary reassignments of labor (or tools) to other crews, or for creating a new temporary crew position, including adding a craft that has not been crew enabled. You do not get many of the validations seen with the New Row button, but you do need to take care with this so that you know what the effects are. Again, in the links sections you’ll find a Maximo Secrets article called Assigning Labor and Tool Assets to Crews which should help.

The Crews application has a few useful actions for viewing the work orders where the crew has been assigned, for viewing the labor and tool assignments, and for viewing the actual labor and actual tool transactions that reference the crew.

Crew Work Groups

A Crew Work Group is used for filtering crews, think of this a bit like a work location in relation to labor. In the Crews application you indicate the Crew Work Group to which a crew belongs.

A Crew Work Group is defined in the Person Groups application by setting a check box, the name of the crew work group is the identifier of the person group. The List tab action ‘Make Available to Crews’ is used to set multiple selected Person Groups and make them Crew Work Groups in one action.

The people in the Person Group that is marked as a Crew Work Group are intended to be the people that are assigned to the crews that belong to the same crew work group. But there is no validation of this as you make labor assignments on a crew.

There is a Crew Work Group in the Responsibility section of the Job Plans and Preventive Maintenance applications. The Crew Work Group on the PM is copied to a work order unless the field is blank in which case it comes from the job plan. The Crew Work Groups field will also be found in the responsibility section of the Work Order Tracking application.

You’ll find a Crew Work Group appears in the Labor tab of the Job Plans application; it is defaulted from the Crew Work Group on the job plan header. This is copied to the same field on the Plans – Labor tab in the Work Order Tracking application, and onto each assignment record in the Assignments tab. The Available Crews action on the assignment table will be filtering for crews that belong to the crew work group.

Crews are supported in the Assignment Manager application and in many of the graphical applications that are part of Maximo Scheduler. There is an action called Crew Assignment Options 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 with one field for setting the Availability Factor for all crews. This affects the available hours of the crews. For example, an Availability Factor of 0.75 on a calendar with an 8-hour shift means that the crew is available to be assigned to 6 hours of work on a workday.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode when we will be discussing Calendars, Shifts and People/Crew Availability.

The music is called Drag Race from the group called TrackTribe, please check them out on TrackTribe.com, all one word.

Until another time, goodbye.

Links

Crew Types – Crew Types

Defining Crews – Defining Crews

Crew Work Groups – Crew Work Groups

Assigning Labor and Tool Assets to Crews Assigning Labor and Tool Assets to Crews

Crew Assignment Status (1) – Required Crafts Crew Assignment Status – Required Crafts

Crew Assignment Status (2) – Required Qualifications Crew Assignment Status – Required Qualifications

Crew Assignment Status (3) – Required Tools Crew Assignment Status – Required Tools