“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 error 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.

The validations for the first release came from analysis made on support calls to IBM. The aim is to enhance in the future so that data validation is in the hands of the user rather than raising a support call and supplying the necessary logs.