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Title

Good afternoon and welcome to the fourth episode in the series on Maintenance Planning. I’m Andrew Jeffery and today we’ll be discussing Calendars and Shifts and how they are used to define People and Crew Availability.

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Learning Objectives

Today, we’ll start by looking at the Calendars application, which is where Shifts are defined, and it is the shifts which create a set of work periods that are used elsewhere in Maximo. When we refer to availability the calendars are being shared between multiple people and crews. We’ll look at how availability is entered in Maximo including with the Graphical Resource View application, a part of Maximo Scheduler which is now available to you in Maximo Application Suite.

Finally, while calendars are fundamental to the use of the Maximo Scheduler, nothing will work in Maximo Scheduler without a calendar, they are also used in other places across Maximo. We’ll discuss calendar use on assets, locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More, configuration items, and service level agreements.

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

Calendars and Shifts

The Calendars application will be found in the Administration module. A calendar has an identifier and a description, a Start Date and End Date . You will want the Start Date to be in the past by a few months and the End Date a date in the future. I would make the end date the end of the year and at least two or three years ahead of time now. Don’t be ridiculous in the setting of the end date, like the end of the century as you are just creating additional records for Maximo to search through. The next decade would be quite acceptable for an End Date.

The calendar display shows the total number of the work hours for the shifts which are applied to the calendar . This can be greater than 24 hours. There are circumstances in the use of Maximo Scheduler where you may have many shifts associated with a calendar. If there are more than three shifts the chances are the total number of work hours is now more than 24. A date with work hours is known as a working day, without work hours a non-working day or non-work date.

If you click a date where it is showing the total number of work hours, in this case the 18th of November 2022, a dialog will open showing you which shifts have been applied to that date. Each row you see in the screenshot on the bottom left is a Work Period, Maximo does not use the calendars and shifts per se, but the defined work periods. If something isn’t working on a particular date, for example if you were assigning a labor or crew to a work order, you should check the calendar and shift that is referenced and check the work period for the date in question. If there is no work period, then the person or crew is not available. There is a Work Periods tab with a table window that shows all the work periods related to the calendar.

Calendars are defined at the OrganizationA structural element of a Maximo database which is used for data sharing and is often aligned to a legal entity of an organisation. More level and there is no status. Today will be highlighted in the calendar, it is the 4^th of November in the screenshot. Today is also shown above the calendar display to the right of the buttons that allow you to scroll through the months and years . There are two actions which we will discuss on the next two slides Define/Apply Shifts and Define/Apply Non-Working Time.

Define/Apply Shifts

A Shift when applied to a Calendar creates a set of Work Period records which are used by the rest of Maximo to evaluate working time versus non-working time. For each Work Period’s Work Date, the working time is the time between the Start Time and End Time, non-working time is all the other time in a week when there is no work period.

A Shift has a Shift Name and Description, a Start Day, and the number of Days in Pattern. The Start Day is a day of the week, normally either Sunday or Monday, use a Monday to start the week with a working day. The number of Days in Pattern should be a multiple of 7, as there are 7 days in a week. A Shift Rotation of three shifts would have 21 days in the shift pattern.

What you see in the top table window in the screenshot are all the Shifts defined for the Organization of the current calendar, there is no calendar field in the SHIFT object, it is not showing the Shifts of the current Calendar. You might also notice that the Shift Pattern has no New Row button . The shift pattern is defined using the blue button action Define Pattern , its dialog looks like that for the second table window, it is acting on the current shift record, which in the screenshot would be COMP1.

If the Start Day is Sunday, then this is 01 in the Sequence of Pattern Day field, and 02 is Monday. If the Start Day of the shift is Monday, then 01 is Monday. You enter the Start Time and End Time for each working day. The Work Hours are calculated, but do not change this as Maximo Scheduler won’t use this number of hours, it currently uses the hours calculated between the Start Time and End Time.

The Pattern Day field is used if you have a calendar with multiple shifts. For example, if my three-shift rotation has Days, Evening, and Night shifts, then use D, E, and N respectively, it will be seen in the Graphical Resource View application of Maximo Scheduler to indicate what part of the 21 day shift a person is working. The button action ‘Fill out workdays data’ is like a duplicate action, it copies the current rows data through to the last day in the pattern. If you have a Start Day of MONDAY, it will require you to remove the Start Time and End Time of sequence 06 and 07 if your calendar is a 5-day work week. An example of a 21-day shift rotation can be found in Maximo Secrets, just search for Calendars.

With a pattern defined for the shifts you wish to apply to the calendar then you select the shifts you wish to apply and use the blue button action Apply Shift(s). The dialog that opens allows you to set the range of dates to apply the shifts too, this defaults to the start and end of the calendar, and this may not be what you want, so beware.

After applying the shifts do go back and check a few dates at the beginning, middle and end of the date range on the calendar to verify that the work periods have been created.

If you scrolled down in the dialog you would come across another table window to create breaks in the working shifts, this can only be done for the days in the pattern which have work hours. For example, if your workday was 08:00 to 17:00, which is 9 hours, then you could add a break between 12:00 and 13:00 for 1 hour. This does not reduce the work hours, they are still 9 hours, however it will visually show in the Graphical Assignment application, another application that is part of Maximo Scheduler, so that you can schedule a gap in the work orders around the time when the labor or crew would be expected to take a break. Breaks are not used elsewhere in Maximo, so I wouldn’t define them unless you were imminently going to use them. You can define multiple breaks in a workday.

Define/Apply Non-Working Time

The Define/Apply Non-Working Time action allows you to create a date that will be treated as a non-working day and apply this to the current calendar. After you have selected the row, then use the Apply button , multiple dates can be selected and applied together. The Type field is the reason for the non-working time, it has options for HOLIDAY, PERSONAL, SICK, VACATION, and OTHER. This implies that the non-working time is used for personal time, as it was more than two decades ago, but it should not be used this way now.

A Calendar is shared between multiple people. We will see in the section on availability how we modify the calendar to indicate non-working time when on vacation or sick, etc. Maximo Scheduler only allows you to reference one calendar (but multiple shifts) therefore the calendar must be shared and not set up individually for a person. This means that you should not use the Define/Apply Non-Working Time action for People or Crew based calendars. I can hear many people saying why not for Christmas and New Year when everyone has the time off. Well, this may not be for absolutely everyone, besides it would stop you creating exceptions for some people coming in for a few hours additional time on days considered a general holiday.

However, it is quite acceptable to use the Define/Apply Non-Working Time for calendars used for other purposes, for example locations and assets, as you cannot use the same dialogs for modifying availability used by People and Crews. The Define/Apply Non-Working Time when applied to a calendar creates a Work Period record where the Shift is the Non-Working Time Type, for example HOLIDAY, and the Shift Hours are set to zero, as are any other shifts applied on that date. The Calendar date will always show zero hours, it applies to the whole day for all shifts. If you make a mistake, you can delete the date after it has been applied to the calendar by clicking on the date or you can do this from the Work Periods tab, the non-working dates will be displayed as the first records in the table window.

When used for location and asset based calendars the Define/Apply Non-Working Time action is used to apply whole days when there is no operational time. But this could be achieved in another way by going to the Work Periods tab and using the New Row button, and this also allows you to enter a partial day. For example, if Operations were going to continue to run on Saturday morning at a work location this could be added to the calendar from the Work Periods tab.

People and Crews Availability

Availability defines the hours when a person or crew is available to perform work. The calendar and shift that is referenced on the People or Crews application defines the base working hours in a week but doesn’t take into account time when the person or crew is not available, or the additional hours that they may do before a shift starts, after a shift ends, or at the weekend if the normal working pattern is Monday to Friday.

In the People application there is an action called Modify Person Availability. In the Crews application there is a similar action called Modify Crew Availability. The dialogs are very similar, and in both cases the dialog is modified slightly when the action is performed from the List tab of those applications against a selected set of People or Crews. I would stick to using the action from the main tab of those applications until you are well used to the dialog, then if you do mass modify people or crew availability do so for only a couple of people or crews until you are used to the mass modify capability, you don’t want to suddenly find that you have updated the availability for every person that has a calendar in your organisation.

You use the Display From and Display To fields in the header to select the period in which you wish to modify time. Use the Display To field first to avoid an error message if the Display From is made greater than the Display To field. The Work Dates table window will be modified as you leave these fields. Use the Select boxes on the left to select the Work Dates that you wish to modify then use the blue button actions Modify or Mass Modify , this will add records to the Modify Work Dates table window for you to modify. Use the Modify action for changing the availability of the current person and Mass Modify if you have selected multiple people from the List tab and wish to change availability for all these people in the same manner.

When the Modify Work Dates table window has been populated you can change the Start Time or End Time and allow the Hours field to be calculated. You should enter the Reason Code. The Mass Modify action opens a dialog where you can modify the Start Time and End Time and enter the Reason Code to apply to all the selected dates, this is useful when you hear people are sick or are taking a week of vacation.

When you are using the Modify Person Availability or Modify Crew Availability from the List tab, then you need to make sure that the people/crew you are selecting have the same calendar or shift, otherwise the dialog will open but there will be no work dates for you to modify. The People or Crews you have selected appear at the top of the dialog and you would now typically use the Mass Modify action. If you only use the Modify action then the change is only being made for the current person in the top table window, not all the selected people.

The Reason Codes are split into two groups Work and Non-Work. For additional work, which adds hours to a person’s availability, the reason codes are WORK or EXTRA TIME. For Non-Work the reason codes are NON-WORK, VAC (Vacation), SICK, PERS (Personal), TRAIN (Training) and MEET (Meeting). The WORK and NON-WORK reason codes are the same as the internal values of the Synonym Domain RSNCODE and are the default values, but you may wish to change this through configuration or give meaning to these two values.

Graphical Resource View

Now that Maximo Scheduler is available in Maximo Application Suite you may consider using its Graphical Resource View application which is a bit easier to use than the Modify Person Availability or Modify Crew Availability dialogs and you can also make modifications to multiple people or crews at the same time.

In the toolbar you select the reason code and beside this whether it should apply to Full Day, Partial Day, or Full Week . If this should apply to an individual, then you just double-click in the cell. If you want to make the change to multiple people, you select them first. If it is a Partial Day a dialog will open for you to adjust the Start Time and End Time, which you do need to do for each person when multiple people have been selected.

In the screenshot Calcott has Vacation (Purple colour) on 26th and 27th December 2022 and half a day Vacation on Friday 23rd December 2022. Calcott, Horn and Belmonte have a half day Extra Time (Orange colour) after their shift on Friday 16th December 2022 and then again on Saturday morning the 17th of December. Partial Days show as a triangle except on non-working days where the whole cell is coloured, but hover over the cell and Maximo shows you the time.

You can make changes to the time and delete modified availability that you have made previously, whether for a single person or for multiple people by double-clicking the cell. There is no drag-drop functionality in the Graphical Resource View application.

The display is grouped by the default craft and for crews it is by crew type . These rows show the total work hours, adding additional time and deducting non-working time.

In the Description field you have right-click actions to View Assigned Work and View Crew Assignments which otherwise you would need to navigate to the Labor application to see, and this is the only application with the action View Availability which shows the whole picture of modified availability for the current year.

If you are using the Maximo Scheduler there are System Properties that go with each of these values, query by skd.modavail.color and you should find the eight properties with the Hex value for the colour.

The small downside of the Graphical Resource View application is that it is only available to people with a Labor record. Service Desk agents may have a calendar and availability and they typically would not have a Labor record unless you were asking them to record their hours in Maximo or they were using the Start Timer or Stop Timer actions.

Calendars across Maximo

All the Maximo Scheduler graphical applications require a calendar and calendars will most often be used when you are looking to implement one or more of these applications, or if you are aiming to use the Assignment Manager application. But people and crew availability are considered when making a work assignment in the Work Order Tracking application, and people availability is considered when you are looking to allocate the next Service Request to someone working on the Service Desk, and so it would be wrong to say that calendars are only used with the Maximo Scheduler.

Calendars are also used with Assets, Locations and Configuration Items to distinguish between operational time and non-operational time. For example, Facility Managers use the Location calendar to indicate the opening hours of a shop, or school. Asset calendars are used to indicate the operational hours of the asset when recording asset downtime. When a calendar and shift is used on an asset the downtime hours are calculated, otherwise downtime is based on a 24-hour day. The calendar and shift of a configuration item might indicate the time when a software application is expected to be available and when it might be down for maintenance periods and backups.

When a calendar is applied to a location, asset, or configuration item the calendar typically has just one shift, multiple shifts may exist on a calendar used with people or crews. One tip I follow is never reference a calendar without a shift, as it is the shift which adds the work periods that will be queried by Maximo, without the work periods a calendar is just an empty shell.

On the Service Level Agreements (SLA) application two calendars may be referenced. The Applies To Calendar is used for filtering records to see whether the SLA is applicable, this is when SLAs are not applicable 24×7. For example, in a school Facility Managers might be expected to have a more stringent SLA during term time than during holiday periods, or for a shop there may be more stringent SLAs during the 6 weeks before Christmas and the 4 weeks afterwards when there is high footfall. The SLA’s Calculation Calendar is used to determine the Hours or Days that count when a response time or resolution time is being calculated. For example, a response of 5 working DAYS, the calculation calendar is used to define the working week.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this video on Calendars, Shifts and People and Crew Availability 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 Job Plans. 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.