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In Maximo Application Suite (MAS) the Maximo Scheduler is available to all clients, there is no longer a separate license for it. Maximo Calibration and Maximo Linear were also included in Maximo Manage as part of the upgrade to MAS 8.4, there is no longer licenses for those add-ons.
To use any of the graphical applications of Maximo Scheduler you need to be a Base user and not a Limited user, a user with access to Maximo Scheduler will consume more AppPoints, this is not true for Calibration and Linear which can be used by a user with only Limited access.
Field Service Management is an important area for MAS, and this is made-up of Maximo Scheduler, the Optimizer (Schedule Optimization) and Maximo Mobile with enhancements also being made to the applications of core Maximo.
This article supplements the Maximo Scheduler Overview https://maximosecrets.com/portfolio/maximo-scheduler-overview which describes the graphical and administration applications of Maximo Scheduler, I have updated this recently mainly to take out references to Weather which is no longer supported.
The Maximo Scheduler Overview discusses the functionality of Scheduler 7.6.8 which was released at the same time as Maximo 7.6.1.2 in July 2020. This is the first part of a series of articles examining the enhancements added over the last 5 years. I am going to start with looking at some enhancements which were added because someone registered an IBM Idea (Request for Enhancement) and sufficient other clients voted for it.
In this article there are a few application acronyms:
- GRV – Graphical Resource View
- GWW – Graphical Work Week
- GA – Graphical Assignment
- GS – Graphical Scheduling
The tests have been performed on MAS 9.1.2.
SCHEDULE-I-70 Start Week Day on Schedule tab
There is a new field delivered in MAS 9.0 Graphical Resource View – Resource tab called Start Week Day. This determines the start of the week in the date ribbon of the Graphical View, it used to be a Monday, now it can be a Monday or any day of the week. The Graphical View always starts with the first of the month and stops at the end of the month.
The same field also appears in the Schedule tab of the Graphical Work Week application. When set to Sunday the week in the Gantt chart starts on the Sunday, this was how it was previously defined. For a five-day week starting Monday, this would appear as a grey band, indicating non-working time, at the left-hand end of the Gantt Chart.
When set to Monday the date ribbon starts on the next Monday, today is a Sunday (21st Sep 2025), it starts then on Monday 22nd September. For a 5-day week you can now avoid the grey band of non-working time at the start of the week by starting the week on a working day.
SCHEDULE-I-80 GWW should bring in labor with secondary crafts that match work.
In Graphical Work Week the labor and crew resources are determined from the assignments made on the work orders included in the work queries. The Duration shows 8 hours, this and the Start Date and End Date are coming from the work order, and not the work assignment because nobody has yet been assigned.
In the Schedule tab there is one Work Query which fetches one work order 1292. This has a work assignment for craft ELECT for 4 hours which is why only the labor with default craft of ELECT are shown, this is the default.
The enhancement idea was to be able to include other labor or crew resources that may have been excluded by the work orders queried, for example labor who could fulfil ELECT work assignments as a secondary craft, their default craft being another craft. Another enhancement idea (Schedule-I-51) was to be able to consistently pull in all the resources who work from the same work location.
The Additional Resource table window was added to meet these ideas.
The Data Source is CRAFT or AMCREWT (Crew Type). You need to specify in a query all crafts that work at a work location or all crafts that can fulfil the work assignments. I know that Rebecca Allen whose default craft is PIPE can also do electrical work, ELECT has been added as a secondary craft to labor ALLEN.
In the query I’ve included – Craft in (‘ELECT’,’MECH’,’PIPE’) – All Crafts at the Needham Work LocationA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More.
In the Graphical View, if you collapse (+) the Crafts you can see that the schedule now includes the Labor whose default craft is ELECT, MECH or PIPE.
When I select work assignment for work order 1292, ALLEN is highlighted as a potential match based on her secondary craft. I can double-click her cell for Monday 22nd September and the assignment is made.
As the Data Source is at the Craft or Crew Type you cannot query by Labor or Crews, you would not be able to query for labor or crews that work in a particular Work Location. The list of Resources are likely to be larger than you would wish and you may need to add a filter to reduce the Resource records shown.
SCHEDULE-I-75 Delete multiple assignments
In the Graphical View of the Graphical Work Week application, you can now select multiple work assignments and use the Delete Assignment action from one of the assignments.
Unfortunately, this does not work whether one selected assignment or multiple and the Unassign action is also not working, both issues have been reported to IBM Support.
SCHEDULE-I-55 Manually Split Assignments
When you have a long work assignment, in this case a 10-hour assignment for an Electrician, when you assign to a labor or crew Maximo will automatically split the assignment to fit in the remaining shift hours of the resource selected and any remaining hours are added to the next available shift period.
I’ve assigned to Rebecca Allen on Monday 22nd September there are 4 hours remaining and an assignment for 6 hours has been automatically created and added to the start of Tuesday 23rd September. An automatic split has occurred by the action of assigning a work order.
The enhancement idea was to allow you to control the split, say for example you wanted only 2 hours on Monday and 4 hours each on Tuesday and Wednesday.
You cannot modify the work assignment except by changing the Start Date and End Date fields, inline editing. These will recalculate the Duration, but you cannot edit the Duration field, which would be useful.
I have modified the second assignment to be the last two hours of Rebecaa Allen’s shift on Monday 22nd September between 1:00pm and 3:00pm, and the remaining 8 hours has moved to the shift hours on 23rd September, again using the inline editing.
I’ve used the Create Assignment action to create a further assignment for Rebecca Allen on the 24th September and changed the hours to be 07:00 to 11:00am, and I’ve reduced to 4 hours the assignment on the 23rd September.
The 10 hour assignment has now been split into three work assignments on consecutive days. You can also drag the bar to a different day, but to modify the duration you need to modify the Start Date and End Date of the assignment.
When you make an assignment, a dialog opens to show the result of the split, I thought it would be possible to adjust these assignments before using the OK button. The process just used may have been possible four years ago when I raised the idea. It is not clear what has changed.
SCHEDULE-I-39 Additional Resource columns
The Work Location and Work Zone have been added to the Resource columns.
The Labor’s Supervisor was also on the original enhancement idea, but this was not delivered. A new idea has been raised – https://ideas.ibm.com/ideas/MASSCHDULR-I-186
SCHEDULE-I-40 Support for multiple shift breaks
In the Calendars application I created a new calendar 12HOUR with two 12-hour shifts 12HRDAY and 12HRLATE. The 12HRDAY shift runs from 7:00AM to 7:00PM and is defined with 12 Work Hours, it is a 6-day work week, Sunday through Friday.
The enhancement idea allows you to now enter multiple Shift Breaks against each day in the shift pattern. For the first day 001 I have entered two breaks between 11:00AM-12:00PM and 3:00PM to 4:00PM, 1 hour in each break. I have repeated this for each subsequent day (002-006). When you subtract the breaks, each workday should now be 10 hours rather than 12 hours.
I’ve created a new work order 1293 requiring 4 hours of craft ELECT with Target Start 23rd September 2025 08:00. In a new Graphical Work Week Schedule I have created a work query for this one work order. There is only one labor resource with calendar 12HOUR and Shift 12HRDAY, that is Jane Boudreau, and she has a Default Craft of ELECT, hence why she is displayed.
The available hours from tomorrow onwards are correct at 10 hours/day. For today, Mon 22nd September it is showing 12 hours and for past workdays it is also showing 12 hours. It looks as if Maximo is only deducting breaks for future work periods and not those for today or in the past, I have reported this to IBM Support.
I wanted to check that calculations were correct if you filled the whole day. I assigned the work order to BOUDREAU, and it started at 7AM, the first available time on the shift, which is correct (this is the top record in the screenshot). I created a new assignment, starting at 11AM and finishing at 6PM – 7 hours. There was only 6 hours of availability remaining on Tuesday 23rd September and so Maximo automatically split to 6 hours (2nd assignment in screenshot) and 1 hour the following day (3rd assignment in screenshot), a dialog opened. This is all correct, 10 hours of availability on 23rd September and 10 hours assigned to BOUDREAU so 0:00 available hours.
There are 60 shift hours in a week, with 11 hours used which is 18.33% allocation. Maximo shows 17%, I think this is taking 12 hours for the 21st and 22nd September. 11 hours used out of 64 is 17.19%. I have added that to the IBM Support case.
The Graphical Work Week does not show the breaks, deliberately not to overwhelm the display. A calendar break has been previously displayed in the Graphical Assignment application on the Assignment View.
On the Work View of Graphical Assignment, the assignments are positioned as they were in Graphical Work Week. The second assignment of 6 hours is coloured yellow, presumably because it is overlapping the non-working time of the two breaks at 11AM-12PM and 3PM-4PM.
In the Assignment View it would be easier to see the breaks if there had been multiple assignment records. The yellow bar is overlapping the two breaks which have a grey background. It is easier to see the two breaks for the 24th September 2025.
I used the right-click bar action Split Work to split the 6 hours into two 3-hour assignments and then moved the assignment bars to start at 12PM and 4PM respectively. Now you can see that Jane Boudreau is fully allocated for the 23rd September 2025, there is no availability remaining. As there is no overlap with non-working time including the breaks, then the bar colours change to green.
MASSCHEDULR-I-140 To not automatically split assignments at end of shift if not enough available hours
If you have a work assignment which is longer than the available hours remaining in a shift’s work period, then Maximo will automatically split the assignment, and you will receive a dialog showing you the split. The enhancement idea was to have an option where it didn’t automatically split but gave you the option to amend the assignments. The issue was that after the split has occurred, if you didn’t want the split, then there are quite a few steps you need to perform to get to the point where you have assigned the way you were intending.
The enhancement should also allow you to assign after hours work without performing a temporary adjustment of labor or crew availability. It is understood that this will be possible by selecting a work assignment and then double-clicking the Resource field, however this gives an error in MAS 9.1.2 which has been reported to IBM Support.
SCHEDULE-I-12 Use Shift Hours instead of hours between Start/End of shift
In the Calendars application Maximo has always had the ability to modify the Work Hours for each Pattern Day. In this example for calendar OFFICE and shift OFFICE, I’ve defined Start/End Time as 8AM to 5PM which is 9:00 Work Hours but this has been amended to 8:00 Work Hours for each day of the week, Monday to Friday in this case.
However, in earlier versions including Scheduler 7.6.8 (Maximo 7.6.1.2) the graphical applications of Maximo Scheduler would ignore the Work Hours and would always use the number of hours between the start and end of each work period. In this example it would by 9 hours and not 8 hours. It was quite a big enhancement idea to use the defined Work Hours.
I’ve changed Person BOUDREAU to use the Calendar/Shift of OFFICE/OFFICE.
In the Graphical Resource View application, I’ve created a resource list called OFFICE which uses Calendar/Shift OFFICE/OFFICE with a Start Week Day of MONDAY.
When entering the Graphical View, the one Craft Electrician shows 8 hours of availability for the one labor that is assigned the same calendar and shift – BOUDREAU – Jane Boudreau. This would have previously shown 9 hours.
I did a test to Modify Availability for a Partial Day and a Reason Code of MEET (Meeting). The Start and End Time are the same as the calendar/shift work period, 8AM to 5PM but the Hours are 8:00 and not 9:00 which is correct.
If you changed the time of the modified availability to 8AM to 4PM the Hours would remain at 8:00 and if modified availability was 8AM to 3PM the Hours would be reduced to 7:00, all OK.
In further testing I did find an issue. If you started with a Partial Day of 8AM to 3PM and 7 hours and you changed in the Modify Availability dialog the End Time to be 5:00PM then the Hours would be changed to 9:00 and you would receive error – BMXAT1095E – The unavailable hours that you entered exceeds the expected work hours for the selected date. This has been reported to IBM Support.
Graphical Work Week also showed 8 hours of availability for BOUDREAU who was assigned the OFFICE/OFFICE calendar/shift which was the same calendar/shift defined for the GWW Schedule, called OFFTEAM.
I also checked Assignment Manager, and this showed 8 hours of availability for BOUDREAU. With 4 hours assigned the % Allocation of 10% was correct.