Last Updated on September 19, 2025 by maximosecrets
Contents
This article was written when Maximo 7.6.1.2 and Scheduler 7.6.8 (released Q3/20) were current. I will be adding a new article to look at the enhancements added since then up to MAS 9.1. The article has been updated so that it is still relevant in the context of MAS 9.1, in the previous version of the article there were references to Maximo Everyplace, Work Centers and applications to support weather integration, which is no longer available in MAS 9.1, these have then been removed.
Topics
Good morning, I’m Andrew Jeffery and I’m pleased to be introducing an overview of Maximo Scheduler.
We’ll start with an introduction and then we will review each of the graphical based applications.
We’ll then look at each of the applications that will be found in the Scheduler Administration module.
To make Maximo Scheduler work you need to plan your work first in other parts of Maximo, mainly the Planning and Work Order modules. Maximo Scheduler extends some of these applications, that detail will not be covered in this presentation.
After you have reviewed this presentation, you may want to refer to “The 12 Steps to Planning and Scheduling Maturity” which takes you through the steps you need to take before being able to utilize the Maximo Scheduler. http://maximosecrets.com/portfolio/the-12-steps-to-planning-and-scheduling-maturity/
So, let’s get started.
Which Scheduler Application?
There are 8 graphical applications in Maximo Scheduler, and 4 administration applications. The optimization capability is a separate product requiring additional AppPoints. To use any of the Scheduler applications the user will consume at least Base level AppPoints.
So, which of the graphical applications do I use?
- Graphical Work Week (GWW) is used for assigning work to labor and crews, week by week, and I would use for any assignments this week and next. The application has a similar functional footprint to the Assignment Manager application.
- Graphical Assignment (GA) has more features than Graphical Work Week and would be used by those clients who still need to schedule the work orders in time before assigning. It would also be used by those users who have a dispersed workforce where they need to assign work spatially, the Dispatch tab has a map, and you can create street level routes. Graphical Assignment would be used for a period of about a month before the work is executed.
- Graphical Scheduling (GS) does not assign labor and crews it is for creating a feasible schedule that ends up writing schedule dates to your work orders. It should help to answer the questions “What are my critical resources, and over what period will they be stretched?”. It is used to try and smooth out resource load versus availability within the reasonable time constraints of performing the work. It is the application that allows you to visualize forecast dates for PMs and consider the workload on available resources. Once a feasible plan has been created it can be monitored over a two-week period to see whether the work orders that were scheduled have broken out (been delayed) from the schedule, or other emergent work has broken in – compliance reporting.
All three graphical applications could be used this week or next, but for different purposes, possibly by different persons in your organization.
This is 3 of the 8 graphical applications, what are the others used for?
- Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects (GSLP) would be used for project planning of maintenance projects including progress reporting.
- Graphical Resource View (GRV) is used for handling resource availability
- Graphical Appointment Book (GAB) is used with customer appointments
- Graphical Crew Management (GCM) is for assigning labor and tools to crews
- Graphical Assignment – Repair Facilities (GARF) is for making location assignments for mobile assets where space in the repair facility is limited
Graphical Scheduling
The Graphical Scheduling application is used from short to long term scheduling, anything greater than 2 or 3 weeks. It has a Gantt view of the work orders with a histogram of load and availability below this, for craft or crew types required by the selected work. The work view is based on queries of work orders, locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More or assets. The queries are always made against work orders, but it may be work orders that reference the selected locations or assets. A rolling schedule may be used for scheduling the next 4-6 weeks, each week a new set of work orders is added to the schedule.
For scheduling beyond 5 weeks, frequency based preventive maintenance records can be forecasted into the future without generating the work orders and this forecast can be pulled into the schedule and mixed with other work orders to see whether there is sufficient resource to undertake all work. Project schedules, normally for shutdowns or outages can be created. Network precedence dependencies can be added between work orders and Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling used on both forward and backward passes to calculate total float and hence identify the critical path. A snapshot can be saved as a baseline or a copy scenario created for what-if analysis. When a feasible plan has been created the schedule dates are committed back to the Maximo work orders. Once the project is underway progress can be entered or calculated.
Drag and drop is used to position the work bars in time, change their durations or to add/modify the network dependencies. Start No Earlier than (SNE) and Finish No Later than (FNL) constraints create a time window when the work order should be scheduled, as you drag the work order beyond the constraints the work order bar changes colour. Once a feasible plan has been created costs can be calculated by week, month and year, or resource load calculated by day, week or month, this data can then be downloaded to a spreadsheet.
A compliance window is created around the short-term plan, a window of 1, 2 or 4 weeks. Planned and actual hours and the number of work orders are monitored along with the total number of work orders that break-in or break-out of the schedule during the compliance period. These scheduling KPIs can then be compared over time to identify the improvements made.
Graphical Assignment
The Graphical Assignment application is used for short term scheduling in the Work View tab when you are preparing to assign work orders to labor and crews, but its primary purpose is to assign labor to craft requirements and crew to crew type requirements. It has a Gantt view of the work orders, network dependencies and Start No Earlier than (SNE) and Finish No Later than (FNL) constraints can be displayed but there is no histogram of resource load and availability, the assumption is that smoothing of resources has already been carried out using the Graphical Scheduling application.
The Work View is based on work order queries. A rolling schedule may be used for scheduling the next 2-4 weeks, each week a new set of work orders is added to the schedule. You can create a scenario and compare this with another scenario or the current schedule.
In the Assignment View tab, you assign labor to craft based on their default craft-skill levels, but you can also assign based on secondary craft-skill levels. You can use the work zones of your labor or crews to match to the locations and assets that exist in the same work zone. When you make the assignment, you are matching the assignment by shift, but long running assignments can be split across shifts. Periods of unavailability of a labor or crew can be entered, similarly the availability can be modified by adding extra hours in what would normally be non-work time.
The Dispatch View tab shows a day schedule with a map displaying the street-level routes that the labor or crew will take, expected travel time between work assignments will be shown. When location-based services are enabled the GPS position of the labor or crew will be displayed allowing emergent work to be dispatched.
The resource assignments can be exported to a calendar (.ICS) which will be sent to the assignee using a communication template.
Graphical Work Week
The Graphical Work Week application is focused on week at a time scheduling and assignment. It will pick up and use the schedule dates created by the Graphical Scheduling application. There is overlap with the Graphical Assignment application which has more functionality particularly around dispatching, you cannot show dependencies, perform a CPM schedule or enter progress in the Graphical Work Week application. The focus is very much on the assignment of work, a graphical representation of the Assignment Manager application.
The top section is based on the work assignments; you can also see work orders with no assignments and create them as part of assigning to a resource. The work list is based on a calendar and shift for when work is to be performed. When compiling the work list, you can use the actions to create it from the Graphical Schedule or Graphical Assignment. A rolling project will pull-in new work assignments which you might do each day or more frequently if you tend to have a lot of emergent work.
The bottom section is the resource view showing a craft with the labor below or crew type with the crew below. The resource queries are restricted to those on the shift and may be further restricted by work zone, work location or any other query that has been defined. You can see which craft or crew types are overloaded for the number of resources that are available because their load/availability values will be shown in red. You can then filter the work assignments based on the resource and reschedule some of them to another day. When doing so, the schedule window between the Start No Earlier Than and Finish No Later Than constraint dates will be shown.
You make assignments by selecting a work assignment, the resources that could match are highlighted, you then double-click the cell for the resource where you wish to make the assignment. You can make multiple assignments to a resource in one action. When assigned you can export the assignments to the calendar of the resource (.ICS). The assignment bar colours show assignment status or priority and then other colours indicate the validation state when the assignment is made so that it is easy to spot when the skills do not match, or the assignment was made outside of the schedule window of the work assignment.
Each cell in the resource view shows the number of hours remaining to be allocated, with any unavailability or extra time also displayed. You can modify a labor or crew availability from the resource view, you can modify the availability of multiple persons, for example when scheduling a meeting. The resource view shows percentage allocation for the week, this is colour coded, turning red when the resource has been overloaded with work assignments.
Columns can be sorted, and records can be filtered. You can filter resources based on selected work and filter work based on selected resources. There is hover-over text and tool tips, and right-click menu options, for example to see the work assignments made, create new assignments or to merge assignments that had been automatically split. In the resource view you can view external assignments and adjust crew assignments for labor and tools.
Graphical Resource View
The Graphical Resource View application shows a calendar view of the labor by craft, or the crew by crew type. The calendar display shows a week view or month view. Select a calendar and one or more shifts. Filter to display labor and/or crews, and further restrict resources by work location, work zone or other resource query.
When the Graphical View opens it is easy to visualise shift patterns including shift rotations.
Unavailability can be entered by selecting a reason code and then modifying the availability for a full day, full week or partial day, for partial day you will need to enter start and end times. Once set you double-click on the cell where this is to apply, for vacation or sick over a whole week you just need to double-click one of the cells in the week. You can add extra time at the start or end of a shift; this would use the partial day setting.
Cells are coloured according to the non-availability reason codes; multiple records of partial availability will be shown as a triangle in the corner of the cell.
On Craft and Crew Type records the cell represents the total available hours for each day. For the Labor and Crew records the shifts pattern day value is shown, for example, D – Days, E – Evenings, N – Nights. The days which are not part of the shift pattern have a grey background, for example, weekends.
You can modify availability for multiple resources by first using the selection box on the left-hand side of the Graphical View then selecting the reason code and time period, before double-clicking one of the resource cells, the unavailability will be added for the other resources. This might be used for training or meetings. Removing unavailability is performed by double-clicking in the cell and using the delete row button.
There is hover-over text and by using the alt-key and clicking a cell you see a tool tip dialog, name, shift details and availability information. There is a right-click menu to view craft/skill/work zone, view availability or view assigned work.
Appointment Book Manager
There are two applications associated with making appointments. The Appointment Book Manager is used for creating appointment books. A customer service representative then uses the Graphical Appointment Book application for scheduling or amending/removing appointments.
An appointment book is a calendar view of the time slots in a day when appointments can be made. The appointment book name you choose can be used for multiple work zones and you can duplicate the appointment book for another work zone. When a call is received by the customer services representative the work zone of the location is used to find the right appointment book manager record. A time zone should be applied for the territory covered by the appointment book; your customer service representative may be in a different time zone.
The appointment windows are slots in the day when appointments can be made, these must fit within the working time of the calendar and shift you choose. For each appointment window you specify the total number of appointments that can be made. Pattern Exceptions are used to specify periods when there is a change to the available appointments for a day and time window slot. For example, for the first 3 Saturdays in October there will be three technicians available for the two morning appointment windows. A history is kept of any changes you make to the appointment window and pattern exceptions.
You specify the job plans that could be performed when an appointment is made and how many appointments are needed to complete the job plan in case it requires more than one appointment. You will need to define the status at which work orders will be created when an appointment is made and whether the appointment slot is created as target dates or schedule dates on the work order. You can also say whether the customer services representative is allowed to assign the labor or crew or fix the scheduled start and end times.
After creating the appointment windows, you apply them to the calendar, and you can view the results in the View tab. From here you can adjust the number of appointments that could be made, for example, if one of the technicians normally assigned to appointments is sick and you want to reduce the number of available assignments for the following week. This can only be done if this will not conflict with existing appointments. There is an action for mass modifying the appointment book availability records across multiple days. Visibility is provided to the appointments that have been made as you need to be aware of these before making changes.
An action is provided to define the administrator access to an appointment book; this can be one or more persons or person groups.
Graphical Appointment Book
The Graphical Appointment Book application is used by a customer services representative for scheduling, rescheduling or cancelling existing appointments. It uses the appointment books created by the Appointment Book Manager application.
The application opens to allow you to search for an appointment slot in four easy steps.
- Select the location or service address where the work is to be carried out
- Select an appointment book
- Select the job plan to be performed, these are the job plans defined for the appointment book
- Choose the appointment slot and make the appointment
If you use the service address to find the location, then if there is just one location at the service address it will populate the location field, otherwise it narrows the search. If the location has an associated work zone, then the appointment books are filtered by this work zone, you need to use an appointment book that has been defined with a work zone. If the location has no work zone, then the selection of appointment books is from the set with no associated work zones.
After the job plan has been selected from the appointment book you use the Find button. This will find existing appointments for this location, other work orders for the location without an appointment, and display the graphical appointment book where the appointment can be made from the right-click menu. When an available time slot is chosen a dialog opens for you to adjust the work order being created and when this dialog is closed the work order that was created shows up as an appointment with the job plan applied. If the appointment book has been set up to allow you to fix the schedule dates, then they will be modifiable when you check the Commit Start Time field. If the appointment book has been set up to allow you to assign the labor or crew then the Assignments table window will appear. As you are making an appointment you can create a log note of type Appointment Note.
There are three buttons for each existing appointment. Manage Assignments will let you assign a labor or crew to the appointment (if you are allowed). Add/View Notes, lets you view the work log for the work order or create additional log note records. Cancel Appointment will also cancel the work order.
You can reschedule the selected appointment or make an appointment for other selected work orders that are needed at the same location. The assignments being made will always be in the time zone of the appointment book, and not in the time zone of the customer service representative.
On the Work Order Tracking application and Assignments tab, the assignment will be marked as Appointment Made and it will also be shown in the Appointment Book Assignments table window. You can also make an appointment from this table window; the next 5 available appointment slots will be shown for you to select from.
There is an escalation to send an email notification to the set of user/custodians for the location the day before the appointment is due.
Graphical Crew Management
The Graphical Crew Management application is aimed at the crew supervisor who works with a set of crews referred to as their crew list. The crew list is based on a single calendar and shift. The crew supervisor needs to assign labor to craft positions and tool assets to tool requirements. In doing so they need to ensure that craft/skill levels and qualifications are being met by those assigned to the crew.
There are two graphical views, both work on a weekly or daily basis depending on how frequently the crew assignments change.
The Crew View shows a Gantt chart with the set of crews in the crew list. Each crew has a coloured crew status. Orange – assignments required, Yellow – when quantity or tool qualification is not met by assigned labor, Green – crew is fully assigned, qualified and available. Right-click options will allow you to see the crew assignment status to understand what validation is not being met, change crew availability, view the work assignments and adjust crew assignments.
The Assignments View shows the rotating tools, crafts and other assets which were pulled in by the resource queries. There are similar colouring in the assignment view, Orange – not assigned, Yellow – failed validations, Green – Labor or Asset meets all the requirements and is available. Shift breaks are shown in grey. Right-click options on the labor record include modify availability, view craft, skills and qualifications, and an option to view crew assignments.
On the Assignments View when in the daily view, you can drag the craft requirement to one of the available labor that has this craft and skill level. Right-click options on the resource bar allow you to create or delete an assignment, or to split a work assignment into two. A grey bar means that the labor has been assigned to another crew. A yellow bar indicates the resource is unavailable. A tool asset might show it is being used by another crew on a different shift.
In the Crew View the description field expands to show the craft requirements for each crew position and any assignments that have been made. Many of the actions available in the Graphical Crew Management application are the same ones found on the Crews application.
Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects
The Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects application is used from short to long term scheduling, anything greater than 2 or 3 weeks. It has a Gantt view of the work orders with a histogram of load and availability below this, for craft or crew types required by the selected work. The work view is based on queries of work orders, locations or assets. The queries are always made against work orders, but it may be work orders that reference the selected locations or assets. A rolling schedule may be used for scheduling the next 4-6 weeks, each week a new set of work orders is added to the schedule.
The Large Projects application has a similar functional footprint to the Graphical Scheduling application but is used for schedules with greater than 500 work orders or activity bars. In the middle you see page numbers instead of all the work orders being on the same page. The application uses server-side processing to allow it to manage projects in the thousands of activities, 50 work records are loaded at a time, rather than fetching all work orders. Child work records are collapsed by default.
Precedence logic can be added between work orders and tasks, and logic lines are displayed but when the dependency is on another page an icon is shown instead, you can click on the icon to show the details. CPM scheduling is performed on the whole project on the server. Backward pass and calculation of float and hence the ability to display the critical path are available as they are for the Graphical Scheduling application. Filtering, sorting and search works across the whole project.
The resource part of the Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects application is not kept synchronised with the activity bars; it is calculated on demand. The calculation is only performed for the time frame that is displayed and when you want to understand the resource load versus availability you need to use the Refresh button.
Instead of recalculating summary activities bars when the durations of child work orders change there is a button to Recalculate Summary Start/End Times. Percent Complete is calculated as a background task rather than immediately. There is an action “Create Schedule From Graphical Scheduling” which allows you to create your large project schedule from a schedule that already exists in Graphical Scheduling. The action Show Activity Ancestors will show you where your current record exists in the work order hierarchy.
PM forecasting is not supported in the Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects application.
Graphical Assignment – Repair Facilities
Assets that move (trains, aeroplanes, trucks/buses, and ships) may have their maintenance performed at a repair facility (rail shed, hanger, garage, shipyard). The site of the repair facility may not be the same as the asset’s site. When you mark a location as a repair facility the Location Assignments table window appears. The child locations of a repair facility can also be marked as a repair facility, and these will be the bays used by the mobile assets when they enter the repair facility.
If Repair Facilities have been enabled for the organization, then on a work order you can indicate the repair facility to use.
The Graphical Assignment – Repair Facilities applications main aim is to assign work orders that require a repair facility to the bays of the repair facility. It is assigning the asset referenced on the work order to the repair facility location bays and not assigning labor or crews to the work order which is the purpose of the Graphical Assignment application. A location assignment is made on the Assignment View tab by dragging an orange bar representing an unassigned work order to a white space in an available bay of a repair facility, this turns the bar green. There is a right-click action to find an Available Location. Once assigned the location assignment will be seen in both the Work Order Tracking and the Locations applications. The assignment is only made on the work order that requires a repair facility and not any of the work orders in its work order hierarchy.
A calendar/shift on the repair facility locations indicates the dates/times when the repair facility will be available. The locations which are the bays must be child locations of the repair facility location, so that when multiple bays are needed, they all have the same parent location. The Scheduled Start, Finish and Duration on the work order are all used to indicate when and for how long the repair facility is needed. You can lock the assignment time, and this marks the location assignment as having an appointment. The appointment required check box indicates that the assignment must be locked in.
A mobile asset can be assigned to multiple bays. You select the bays you want to assign and then use the right-click action Assign to Selected Locations. One location assignment is made primary and the others secondary, they have a slightly lighter green bar and blue at the end of the bar. The primary assignment has white text and the secondary bars black text. Moving the primary assignment in time will move all secondary assignments.
There are some other right-click bar options like being able to add a log note to the work order.
Double-booking a location will shade the location and its description yellow. Moving a work order beyond its time constraints (SNE and FNL constraint dates) will colour the work bar yellow. If you move the work bar to occur at a time which is not entirely within the shift of the locations calendar, then both the bar and the location will be coloured yellow. The location assignments could be performed on the Locations or Work Order Tracking applications, but it would not be obvious when these validation issues are present.
The Work View tab is for seeing all the work orders that were brought into the schedule in a Gantt chart. There are also right-click options on this tab.
Scheduling Alternate Resources
The Scheduling Alternate Resources application is used with Graphical Scheduling or Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects schedules. It is used to provide an alternate level of availability of craft, crew type or tool item resources for the whole scheduling project or over a period. The changes to the available quantities are made for a particular shift where the resource is used.
It is used because for a future project the individual resources remain unknown, or you are aiming to use sub-contractors and the labor records may either never be entered or are unknown at this stage. Some clients do not use Maximo calendars and availability and so this provides a way of being able to reflect the availability that you wish to use for your schedule. It could also be used for what-if analysis, what-if I increased the level of electricians by two weeks in November, which is the example used in the screenshot.
A schedule is selected from the lookup and then the Modify button will copy the resources used on the schedule to the Modify Alternate Availability table window. The quantities can then be amended or the Add New Alternate Availability button at the right end of the table window used to add alternate availability for a period.
The Use Alternate Availability check box on More Information tab of Graphical Scheduling or Graphical Scheduling – Large Projects applications will need to be selected to allow these alternate resources to be used.
Alternate resources only work at the Craft level and not Craft-Skill level.
Configure Tooltips
There are tool tips available on Graphical Scheduling and Graphical Assignment applications including for the Large Projects and Repair Facilities versions. A tool tip is displayed on the Graphical view for the work or resource record when you use the Alt-Click action or Option-Click action on a Mac. Tool tips have also been added to the Graphical Work Week and Graphical Resource View applications, and they also exist on Graphical Crew Management application.
There are 13 tooltips that can be configured in the Configure Tooltips application. These configuration records are defined at the SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More level and as an administrator you may need to first set your Default Insert Site. You can use the Tooltip Preview button, but this will not show any values, so you will probably test in the application where the tool tip is used.
The fields that can be used must first be defined as a property in the Configure Gantt View Properties – Default Settings action.
System Properties can be defined to modify what appears in an activity or resource bar (.tip) and what appears when you hover over an activity or resource bar (.tip.tpl).
Schedule Data Manager
“You cannot schedule work unless you can plan work. If you do not plan then you are assigning work and not scheduling work.”
Some clients fail to implement Maximo Scheduler successfully and as you can see it has a lot of useful functionality, far more so than many expect. The main reason for failing to implement Maximo Scheduler is that the data is not prepared, many of the work orders are missing key elements that are required or highly desired. You’ll get nowhere without a calendar, and some applications will be very difficult to use without a non-zero duration for the work order.
The Schedule Data Manager application allows you to analyse and validate the data for a schedule and then fix the data within the application using in-line editing without the need to navigate constantly to the Work Order Tracking application. What is validated is dependent on which application the schedule is set up for:
- Graphical Scheduling (& GS-LP) – Calendar, Queries, Work, Dependencies, Resources
- Graphical Assignment – Calendar, Queries, Work, Dependencies, Assignments
- Graphical Work Week – Calendar, Queries, Assignment
There are no validations for Graphical Appointment Book, Graphical Crew Management, Graphical Resource View and Graphical Assignment – Repair Facility. There is also no validation of Preventive Maintenance records.
You can navigate from the graphical applications to the Schedule Data Manager application. The information shown on the Details page is displayed for reference, but it is read-only, you need to modify it in the graphical application.
On each tab there is a series of check boxes corresponding to the validations that should be performed, and you use the Validate buttons to start the validation. There is a Cron Task so that the validation can be performed in the background.
The Error/Warning messages are displayed, sometimes there may be more than one for a single record. You can use in-line editing to correct some of the issues and there are icons to the right of the Error/Warning column that opens dialogs for editing. For example, Show Work Plan shows the planned Labor, Materials, Services and Tools, editing this data will be dependent on the work order status and whether planned data is allowed to be modified. There are over 40 errors and warnings that are validated across the various graphical applications.
The dialogs are: Show Work Plan, Modify Assignments, Modify Schedule Dates, Show Actuals, Show Circular Dependencies and Override Availability.
Thank you for listening
That brings this overview of Maximo Scheduler to an end. Maximo Scheduler is in its 16th year, Scheduler 7.1. was released in 2009. There has been a lot of functionality built into core Maximo applications like Job Plans and Work Order Tracking as well as those applications discussed in this article, then there is schedule/assignment optimization with the Maximo Optimizer.
In MAS, Maximo Scheduler is available to be used by all clients, there is no separate license. As most Maximo clients have work orders then some of these graphical applications will be relevant to you. But as with most things in life you cannot start at the deep end, you may aspire to using optimization engines to automate your scheduling or work assignment processes, but you need to build up to it step by step, and that is where the articles that are part of the 12 Steps to Planning and Scheduling Maturity come in.
Thank you for listening.