Last Updated on December 28, 2022 by maximosecrets

The music is called Drag Race from a group called TrackTribe.

Hello, and welcome back to Maximo Bite Size. A series of videos on the functional aspects of Maximo Manage.

Title

Good morning and welcome to the third episode in the series on Maintenance Planning. I’m Andrew Jeffery and today we’ll be discussing Crews, two applications Crew Types and Crews but we will also see where Crew Work Groups fit in. 

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Learning Objectives

Today, we’ll be looking at two more applications found in the Resources sub-module a part of the Administration module. Crews is today’s subject, and while I think of a crew as being a team of people digging up the road while I wait in the queue for the traffic light to turn green, a crew in Maximo can be any sized team where two or more persons work on a regular basis.

You cannot create a Crew in Maximo without having a Crew Type, which is the template for a Crew and so this is where we’ll start. The record structure of the Crew Type is copied into the Crew, the crew positions and their craft requirements, the required tools, and qualifications. The Crews application is where we will head next, it has the assignment of labor to the crew positions and the assignment of tools to the required tools, verifying with the assignments that the qualifications needed for the crew are being met. If you know Crew Types and you look at the Crews main tab and think, I now understand Crews, well you will only be partly right. The two tabs for Labor Assignments and Tool Assignments is where Crews gets interesting, so we’ll be spending time on this.

A Crew Work Group is the body of people, who have labor records, from whom the Labor Assignments of one or more Crews are made. People have holidays and are sick or have other reasons for not being available, so you need to temporarily backfill crew positions from others who are available so that the Crew can go out on their jobs.

When considering work planning you can think of a Crew Type like a Craft, it is what you reference on a Job Plan, I need a Crew of a Crew Type to fulfil some work. When the assignment is made on a work order, you are assigning one of the Crew, in a similar way to how you assign a labor to a craft requirement.

There is a lot to go though, so, let’s get started.

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. Unfortunately, there is no data for Crew Types and Crews in the MAXDEMO database for you to follow, but you will find a series of articles on Crew Types, Crews and Crew Work Groups on maximosecrets.com, just search for Crews. 

When you create a new Crew Type the status will be set to ACTIVE, the other state is INACTIVE, but you will not be able to make a crew type inactive if it is referenced on a crew. Crew Type records are defined at the Organization level in Maximo.

You will need to define a set of crew positions and then specify the craft that is required for each crew position . One position, one craft, but the same craft and/or skill level, vendor or labor rate contract can be referenced multiple times . For example, you could have two electricians working together, a LEADER position and a WORKER position with the same craft requirement of ELECT – SECONDCLASS. However, before you can enter your positions you will need to set them up in the ALN domain called AMCREWPOSITION. Some typical positions might be Driver, Leader, Worker, or Helper, or for a utility team it might be Linesman1 and Linesman2.

When you are creating the Required Crafts against the Crew Type you might find that you receive the error message ‘BMXAA4191E – The value ELECT is not valid for Craft. Specify a valid value for Craft.’. If you had watched the previous video, you might have picked-up at the end of the section on Crafts that there is a Crew field in the header which you must set for the Craft to be selected on a Crew Type or Crew. You can do this in bulk from the List tab of the Crafts application using the action Make available to Crews. 

There are two other table windows in the Crew Types application, Required Qualifications and Required Tools. For Required Tools you will also find that there is a Crew field in the header of the Tools application, and the Tool will need to be made Active at both the Item Set and Organization level, to be used on a Crew Type. But there is also one more setting for a Tool, it must be set to Rotating because you will be assigning a tool asset to the Crew. The List tab action Make available to Crews will also be found on the Tools application.

Tools can have Required Qualifications; it is a table window found at the bottom of the main tab of the Tools application. These are the qualifications required to use a tool. If you look closely at the bottom of the screenshot there is one Required Qualification that was copied from the Required Qualifications of the Tool that I had entered lower down in the application. You can use the New Row button to add additional Required Qualifications and link them to the Positions on the Required Craft. This will mean that when you make the Labor assignment to that Position the Labor must fulfil both the craft requirement for the position as well as the qualification requirement. For the BTRUCK qualification – Bucket Truck Driver, no Position is referenced, this means that anyone who is assigned to the crew can have that qualification. In the example, it would normally be the DRIVER position who fulfils the Bucket Truck Driver qualification, however, for qualifications marked as added by Tool the Position field is read-only.

The Required Qualification table window normally is presented in its closed position, and you need to use the right-hand end button in the toolbar, Show Table . For a new record you can enter a Quantity if say two people need the same qualification, the Quantity field will be read-only if you enter a Position. There is no Quantity field in the Required Tools table window, if you need multiple of a tool, for example two mobile traffic lights, then you enter the same Tool on multiple rows with a different Tool Sequence value. If you are wondering what a Tool Sequence is, it is nothing more than a label to give the record a unique value, like Position for the Required Crafts. For the two traffic lights the Tool Sequence might be SIGNAL1 and SIGNAL2.

All three table windows have a Remarks field with long description. In the header of the application an Hourly Rate is calculated from the hourly rates of the chosen Required Crafts and you can use the Override Hourly Rate if you wish to provide a different rate. The Hourly Rate does not include Tool Rates which are defined at the Organization level, this might be one reason why you override the rate.

Crews

When you create a Crew, you must specify the Crew Type , it is a mandatory field. The Required Crafts, Required Tools and Required Qualifications are copied from the crew type to the crew. These three table windows look exactly as they do in the Crew Types application. You can just make out at the bottom of the screenshot that three Required Crafts were created when we associated the Crew Type BOSOHL.

Once the crew has been created 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. 

Crews are defined at the Organization level (like Labor) and the status of a crew is the same as for a crew type, ACTIVE, the default, and INACTIVE. You will not be able to make the crew inactive if it is referenced on an active Job Plan or an open Work Order. There is an action View Work Orders which will help you find the open work orders. For open work orders it is the Planned Labor that is checked, an assignment against the crew will not stop the crew from being made inactive.

There will be restrictions on what you can change on the Crew record about the three table windows once you have started to assign Labor and Tools to the crew. The crew must be in Active state to make these labor and tool assignments.

There are several fields in the header of a crew which you will be familiar with as they also exist on the Labor application. The Calendar and Shift will be needed to be able to add the availability of the crew which you manage with the action Modify Crew Availability or the Graphical Resource View application, a part of Maximo Scheduler, but available to you in Maximo Application Suite. Calendars, Shifts and Availability will be the subject of the next video.

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 labor which are assigned to the crews will probably have the same references for these two fields, they are useful for filtering labor and crew records. If the crew is crewed with a subcontractor team, you would enter the Vendor, and a Contract if you are using Labor Rate Contracts in Maximo.

The Hourly Rate will not start to be calculated until the Labor Assignments are being made. The Override Hourly Rate is not copied from the associated Crew Type record.

The three fields in the second column of the header Use Labor LocationA type of location which can hold inventory and is one of the Transit Locations. More, Save Location with Work Order and Location Refresh (in seconds) are all used with GPS Tracking. The two fields in the third column Start Location and End Location are used with creating Street Level Routes to plot the route the crew will take on a map when they work in the field against multiple dispersed work orders. Crew Work Groups we will return to in the last section of this video.

Crews – Labor Assignments

As a subject there is a lot more to Labor Assignments and Tool Assignments than can be covered with a couple of slides. There is also a Graphical Crew Management application, part of Maximo Scheduler but now available under Maximo Application Suite, that can be used to visualise the crew assignments. If you are going to get to grips with this subject, then set aside a couple of days. Fortunately, you will find several articles on crews at Maximo Secrets.

Before you start to make Labor and Tool Assignments to Crews you should set up availability for the crew as we will find out in the next video. On the Labor Assignments tab , you are assigning a labor to a crew position by matching the craft and/or skill level requirements that were defined for the position , these may have included the vendor and labor rate contract reference. The Labor Assignment is made from an Effective Date , a date/time which would normally be the start time of a shift on a date when the crew is available, the default is the start time of today’s shift. The End Date of the assignment is normally left empty meaning that the labor is assigned to the crew permanently or until a change occurs. 

It is important that you align the calendar/shift of the Labor you assign to the crews with the same calendar/shift as you defined for the crew, otherwise there will be times in the day when the labor is not available.

In the Labor Assignments tab there are three table windows, the Required Crafts , Required Qualifications, and the Assigned Labor which is where you make the Labor Assignments to the crew positions. There are two actions for the Assigned Labor table window New Row and New Unrestricted Row, I’ll explain the later of these in a minute. As you make the Labor Assignments the Hourly Rate will be calculated based on the craft of the labor you choose.

The screenshot is showing one Assigned Labor, CALCOTT with an Effective Date of 10/31/22 7.00AM (today), there is no End Date. This would be considered a permanent assignment. Notice that while the craft lines up to the DRIVER position it is not an exact match as the Craft-Labor record selected was DRIVER with a Skill Level of FIRSTCLASS.

As you make the Labor Assignments hopefully everything lines up OK and there is a perfect match to each of the positions. This is where the Crew Assignment Status action is used, it will indicate the status of each assignment made for each Crew Requirement Position. There are a few statuses apart from OK:

• REQ NOT MET (Requirement Not Met) – Assigned labor does not meet the requirements for the position. This occurs if there is not a perfect match between the four fields craft, skill level, vendor, and contract between that required for the position and the labor assigned. For example, if the Required Craft was for a Craft of DRIVER but you assigned the labor record with a craft of DRIVER and a skill level of FIRSTCLASS then it will not be a match and REQ NOT MET will be shown, Maximo does not consider whether someone is overqualified, only whether it is an exact match. This is the value we got for the assignment of labor CALCOTT.
• NOT AVAILABLE – Assigned labor is either not available during the shift, or there is a shift mismatch, or the labor is assigned to other work orders. If the calendar or crew do not have a calendar and shift or the calendar does not have a work period date for the date shown in the dialog, then NOT AVAILABLE will be shown as priority over REQ NOT MET.
• NOT ASSIGNED – No labor is assigned for the craft requirement. This might mean that a labor assignment had been made but the End Date is now in the past. 
• MULTIPLE – Multiple labor have been assigned to the same position with overlapping times, their Effective Date and End Date overlap.

The Crew Assignment Status action dialog allows you to review the status of labor assignments, qualifications, and tool assignments for a particular date. If you change the date the records are refreshed, so if the status is all OK today, it may not be tomorrow. There are five table windows, the other two are the Labor Assignments and the Tool Assignments for the selected date. 

As you make new Labor Assignments to positions where labor already exists, Maximo will do its best not to overlap the records. For example, if you assigned LIBERI to the DRIVER position from a date next week then CALCOTT would have an End Date for his Labor Assignment so that LIBERI and CALCOTT assignments do not overlap.

You would have received the warning message “BMXAT0347W – Labor CALCOTT is already assigned as DRIVER for the specified date. Do you want to replace labor CALCOTT with labor LIBERI? Click Yes to replace labor CALCOTT with labor LIBERI. Click No to assign labor LIBERI as an additional resource to this crew.” 

Answering Yes performs a permanent replacement, CALCOTT will no longer be on the crew from LIBERI’s Effective Date. Answering No performs a temporary replacement for the period when LIBERI is being placed on the crew. Maximo creates a new Labor Assignment for CALCOTT starting the period when the temporary replacement with LIBERI ends.

The New Unrestricted Row action provides a different dialog box, and it suppresses many of the warnings which you might otherwise get. It can get you easily into positions where you have multiple labor assigned to the same position for a period. One of the features of the New Unrestricted Row occurs if the labor is already assigned to a different crew, then it will remove them from that crew for the specified period and return them to that crew if the original assignment is longer than the new one. It is useful for making these temporary assignments. Other benefits of the New Unrestricted Row action are that it can create an additional crew position and labor assignment in one action or add a craft that has not been crew enabled.

I would use the New Unrestricted Row action only after you are familiar with making Labor Assignments and then introduce it slowly until you are familiar with the issues that it can create and the benefits it can provide. 

You cannot delete labor assignments where the Effective Date is in the past. You can provide an End Date which is in the past and this will make the labor assignment disappear because it is only showing assignments where the end date is null or in the future, but the record still exists in the table.

The action View Assignments shows the Assigned Labor and Assigned Tool Assets for a date range that you specify between a Start Date and End Date. You will need to use the Refresh button to fetch the records after making changes to those dates.

Just a final word on the Hourly Rate field on the main tab, it is only calculated when you make labor assignments, it does not include tool hourly rates, and the rates it uses come from the craft rate table and not the labor craft rate table. It is the Override Hourly Rate field, which is used on a work order, if this is present.

Crew Tool Assignments

Tool Assignments are made in a similar manner but from the Tool Assignments tab . There are two table windows Required Tools and Assigned Tool Assets, remember it is assets of Item Type TOOL which you assign.

If you use New Row Maximo will check whether the tool asset is already assigned to another crew, and you would receive the error message “BMXAT0770E – Asset 1422 has conflicting crew assignments for the dates specified. Change dates, resolve conflicts manually, or add using unrestricted row.” 

I am showing the New Unrestricted Row dialog where you select the Tool Sequence for the crew. This differs a little from the similar dialog in the Labor Assignments tab in that you are looking up any Position from the ALN domain and not just the Positions which have been created for the crew. In the case of Tools there is no equivalent ALN Domain, it is only the tool sequence references you created for the crew.

Going back to the example I gave a while ago in this video, the utility crew could be taking up to four traffic lights on an assignment. You could create all four tool requirement records, SIGNAL1 through SIGNAL4, and assign tool assets to the number of tool sequence records that you need, which for most of the time would just be two. Alternatively, you could leave it as two tool sequence records and add additional tools to the work order if you needed three or four traffic lights. You needn’t create tool sequence records for all the tools that the crew will ever go out with, only the tools which are needed most of the time and which would stop the crew from forming if the tool assets were not available. 

The other fields in the dialog are Asset, which is mandatory, the Tool Number, the Effective Date, also mandatory, and the End Date. The Select Value on the Tool Number are the Tool Items marked as Rotating. This field will be filled when you select the Tool Sequence, but you can change it. For example, you have multiple types of bucket truck for handling different heights, you could select a different type of bucket truck to the one that normally goes out with the crew.

After you use OK the Assigned Tool Assets row is filled. The Asset field in this table window does have a Detail Menu action called View Crew Assignments which allows you to see where the tool asset has been assigned between two dates. There is a Refresh button to perform the query. The same is applicable on the Labor field in the Assigned Labor table window on the Labor Assignments tab.

Something to bear in mind is that if the Tool Asset is held in a Storeroom as shown in the Stocked Tools application, then you should still issue the tool asset from the storeroom and return it when no longer required.

The Crew Assignment Status action shows the Requirement Status for each Required Tool. There are the same set of five statuses as there were for Labor, OK, REQ NOT MET, NOT AVAILABLE, NOT ASSIGNED and MULTIPLE.

The Required Qualifications will be seen on the Labor Assignments tab and has a simple set of two statuses OK or NOT QUALIFIED.

There are a few other View actions in the Crews application we have not made a reference to:

• View Status History shows the status changes between ACTIVE and INACTIVE.
• View Work Order shows the crew work assignments between two dates
• View Actuals History shows the reported hours between two dates for labor and tools which reference the crew

Crew Work Groups

A Crew Work Group is used for filtering crews. In the Crews application you indicate the Crew Work Group to which a crew belongs. You might think of this in a similar way to how you might consider a work location in relation to labor. For a utility that works multiple regions and areas, a Work Location may be each depot, there could be multiple in an area and multiple crews could go out from the same depot. A Crew Work Group might be at Depot, Area, or Region level, it depends at what level you perform the planning of crew assignments to work.

You use the Person Groups application to define a Crew Work Group, the name of the Crew Work Group is the Person Group identifier . There is a Crew Work Group field in the header of the Person Groups application which needs to be set. This can be set for multiple person groups by using the List tab action ‘Make Available to Crews’. The People you add to the Person Group would be the pool of people that you use to make the Labor Assignments to the crews that referenced the Crew Work Group but there is no validation of this.

Crew Work Groups are used to define who is responsible for work. The Crew Work Group will be found in the Responsibility section in the Job Plans, Preventive Maintenance and Work Order Tracking applications. The PM Crew Work Group takes priority over the one from the Job Plan when generating PM based work orders. The Crew Work Group is also on the Job Plan Task, it is the third task field along with Owner and Owner Group that gets copied at the task level to the work order. All fields to define who is responsible for the task.

The Crew Work Group will also be found on the Labor tab of the Job Plan, where it flows through to the Plans – Labor tab on the Work Order Tracking application and on to the work assignments on the Assignments tab. On work assignments, crews are being filtered by the Crew Work Group. On the Job Plan Labor tab, the Crew Work Group is defaulted from the value entered on the Job Plan header. 

On the Plans – Labor tab on the Work Order Tracking application the Crew Types are also filtered by the Crew Work Group. There is no direct association between a Crew Type and Crew Work Group, but Maximo does this by looking at the Crews associated with the Crew Work Group and filtering to only the Crew Types of those Crews. The Crew Work Group is therefore acting as a filter for the Crews that can be assigned to a work order. 

You’ll find that the Assignment Manager application also fully supports Crews and Crew Work Groups and where you see the Crew Work Group column on the upper table window, the Work List, then this is coming from the Assignment record. Getting the Assignment’s Crew Work Group populated is important and you will need to work out where in the overall process from Job Plan through to Work Order Assignments it is entered. 

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 in the Assignment Manager application. 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 up to 6 hours of work on a workday. 

The crew’s actual hours that are spent on work orders is supported in both the Work Order Tracking application – Actuals tab with the Enter Time by Crew action and in the Labor Reporting application using the Enter By Crew action. Both actions use a similar dialog where you select the Crew and a Work Date and when you use the Refresh button the assigned Labor and Tools for that work date are populated. In this dialog on the Work Order Tracking application when you enter a new row in the Work Order Assigned to Crew table window it defaults to the current work order and you enter the Start Time and End Time, and the Actual Duration is calculated. In the Labor Reporting version of the dialog, you can enter multiple work orders, as if you were filling in the time report at the end of the shift. In both cases the Select Crew button writes transaction records in the Labor Reporting table, LABTRANS, for each person assigned to the crew.

This dialog will also be writing Actual Tool records if there are Tool Assignments on the crew. This will require a Tool Rate which is entered in the Tools application and Tool/Organization Details action. Without the Tool Rate you will receive error ‘BMXAT0417E – The tool does not have an associated rate for current organization.’ and this will prevent you from saving the crew’s labor time.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this video on Crew Types, Crews and Crew Work Groups and found it useful and thank you for watching. We would like to see you back in our next episode when we will be reviewing Calendars, Shifts, and People/Crew Availability. Don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button, and if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up.

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Until another time, Goodbye.