Last Updated on February 23, 2025 by maximosecrets

Introduction

Good morning, I’m Andrew Jeffery and I’m pleased to be introducing “The 12 Steps to Planning and Scheduling Maturity”

We’ll start with an introduction and then we will review what we mean by Assigning, Planning and Scheduling from a Maximo context.

We’ll finish by asking ourselves the question of what we really mean by the term Scheduling.

So, let’s get started.

Some people use the term planning and scheduling but when you find out what they actually do, they are assigning technicians or crews to work and not planning at all, and certainly not scheduling.

You can assign work without planning it, but it is better to assign work after you have planned it.

When it comes to scheduling, setting a date when work is due to start without taking into account whether all the work you have scheduled is feasible against the resource availability is really just creating a plan, it is not scheduling. You must plan your work before you can schedule it.

This presentation will describe a 12-step method towards planning and scheduling maturity, it is written from a Maximo perspective, and will be useful to any customer that has purchased the Maximo Scheduler.

Assign

Assigning work is the process of assigning labor or crew to a work order or task.

Level 1

Many organizations dispatch a work order to a technician or crew, or they allow a self-dispatching model to be used. In Maximo terminology this is adding an owner or crew to a work order or task. We use the Owner field in both cases because that is the default method for a maintenance supervisor to assign when using the Work Centers. 

Level 2

The second step is creating one or more work assignments with the required effort in hours. If the end goal is to use Maximo Scheduler, then this works on the basis of assignments. Assignments allow multiple people to work on the same work order or task at the same time. This is using the Assignments tab on the Work Supervision Work Center or Work Order Tracking application. When you assign a labor the default craft is entered, when you assign a crew, the crew type is entered. Labor and crews will need to have a calendar and shift applied to make these assignments. 

Level 3

The third step is managing the work assignments within the availability of a shift. You will need to define periods of unavailability for work, or periods when the labor or crew have agreed to work extra hours, this defines the working hours of each work period. The Assignment Manager application will now help you to make assignments within the available hours of the labor or crew.

At each level we have not planned the work, we have not decided beforehand that a work order will require 3 hours of an Electrician, we could be making the assignments the day before the work order is actually assigned. We have not mentioned the Graphical Assignment application, which is part of Maximo Scheduler, this is because you need to have the assignments first, in effect you need to plan first before using the Maximo Scheduler applications.

Plan

Planning work is the process of determining the requirements needed to fulfil the work.

Level 1

In Maximo, the work order has a work plan which can either be entered manually for each work order or first defined on a Job Plan. Most work of a repeatable nature should have a job plan, and their use shouldn’t be limited to PMs or condition-based work. Eventually, if you are going to get to the most mature levels in planning and scheduling then all work orders need to define their resource requirements.

The first step is to identify the job codes, provide a description and duration and attach the instruction document or maintenance procedure which your organization already has. In the Job Plan application, it would also be good practice to associate the locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More and assets that the job plan is applicable to, the work assets, this will help Maximo users to find the job plan, particularly for emergency and corrective work.

It seems such a simple step, it is, the benefit of having job plans for most work is that as you assign labor or crews and record actual hours on a work order you are now trapping information that will be useful for you to progress to level 2. 

Level 2

The second step is to add the craft and crew type, their hours and quantities, and the material requirements for the job plans. If you had reached Assign-Level 2, then you should be able to analyse the actual hours, and materials issued or ordered on previous work orders to determine what should be entered on the job plan. Don’t forget to adjust the duration, the duration is important because a zero duration in one of the graphical tools of Maximo Scheduler is a vertical line, it is much easier to see and grab a rectangle of 1 hour.

In Maximo, when a job plan is applied to a work order it creates both the work plan and if there are craft or crew type requirements, then also the assignment records, at waiting assignment status. Similarly, when the work order is approved, work plan material requirements will create the storeroom reservations or if direct issue then they will raise a purchase requisition. That is a lot of automation, from a little bit of planning.

A Planning-Level 2 maturity should also have a work priority set on the job plan as in scheduling you will probably want to order work by location/asset priority and work priority, in order to determine which work orders to perform first. If you are planning on the Work Order Tracking application, then there is an action that will create a job plan from the work plan.

Level 3

The third step in planning work is to develop the job plan further, with a particular focus on providing additional details that will benefit the technician in the execution of their work and ensuring that you are capturing costs. Assume here that you are planning for your technicians to use mobile devices, even if they do not currently.

• Adding tasks and their long descriptions to step the technician through the work they need to perform
• Linking tasks to inspection forms, for example an inspection form could be used for a simple risk assessment, or an after-work quality assessment.
• Adding precedence logic for more complex work orders perhaps where tasks can be performed in parallel and adding Flow Control so that one task cannot be started until its predecessor(s) have finished, for example, where isolation of assets is needed.
• Indicating whether asset downtime or an appointment is required or whether the work needs to be scheduled in a maintenance window.
• Adding the specialist tools and services needed to perform the work. In Maximo this will create a reservation for the tool and a purchase requisition for the service.
• All labor, material, service and tool records should have cost rates applied. You should be aiming to manage work against a maintenance budget, even if you do not need to formerly do so, perhaps because it is handled in another system. You should be able to understand life cycle costs for assets, in order to make better decisions on when to repair and when to replace.

Level 4

The fourth planning level is adding control to the approval process of the job plan and using revisions to draft changes. Also, you tend to create a lot of job plan records, and there are some ways of reducing the number of records to make them easier to manage. 

• Similar job plans can be consolidated by applying conditions on tasks, labor, material, service or tool records. When the job plan is applied to a work order if the condition on the task evaluates as true then the task will be added to the work order, similarly for the conditions on labor, material, service or tool records.
• Dynamic Job Plans is where the labor, material, service or tool resource requirements are calculated when the job plan is applied to the work order and this is based on the number of work units required. This is most likely to be associated with linear assets; roads, rail tracks, cables, pipes, overhead lines, or areas; grounds, car parks, runways, floor area, scaffolding, etc. But it could be based on the volume of assets being inspected, for example, electric Portable Appliance Testing. Using dynamic job plans can help to reduce the volume of records.
• If you have multiple similar job plans where they differ based solely on the language used, then using a language table for the job plan description or task description or their long descriptions, can help to reduce the number of records to manage.

Schedule

Scheduling work is the process of managing how to fulfil a set of work orders efficiently

Level 1

All work orders should have a target start date, and target finish date calculated by adding the duration of the work order. You get this with frequency-based work orders created for PMs and inspections. For other work you can either set the target date manually or apply a Service Level Agreement based on the work priority originating from the job plan and/or asset/location priority.

Ideally, you would also create a time window around the target dates by using constraint offsets on the job plan or PM. The time window provides a date when it would be acceptable to start the work order early, or a date which indicates the latest it should finish.

Level 2

The second step in scheduling work is to create a relatively smooth profile of resource usage against availability for all frequency-based work. This is achieved by forecasting the PM records and using the Graphical Scheduling application of Maximo Scheduler. This is typically a yearly plan which should take into account holidays when setting availability. This process should also take into account when assets will become available for the PM work if asset downtime or a maintenance schedule window is required. This is long term scheduling.

Level 3

Step 3 has three different tasks ranging from medium to short term scheduling:

• Medium term scheduling reviews the work to be performed by a team or work area over a 3-month period, perhaps delaying some work so that it fits around the profile of resource availability. This should take into account training, holidays and other non-work activity. This also uses the Graphical Scheduling application of Maximo Scheduler. If too many work orders are being moved to the next period, then you should consider planning overtime or using external services, rather than creating a bow wave of work orders that are unlikely to be addressed in the next or future periods.
• Material/Service planning occurs when the medium-term schedule has been created. You should review the first 4 weeks of the schedule to identify the material and service needs of the work orders, delaying those work orders which cannot be fulfilled in time, and bringing in other work orders to take their place, then moving on to the next four week period in the three month plan. Many work orders get delayed simply because materials or services are not available, this needs to be addressed in order to progress through scheduling maturity levels.
• Short term scheduling of work orders over a two-week period when you know that materials and services will be available helps to create a feasible set of schedule dates that can be committed back on to the work orders. The planners should be discussing and agreeing the schedule with work supervisors, they will be using the Graphical Scheduling application of Maximo Scheduler.

Level 4

Step 4 is moving an organization or team towards measuring how well they comply with the plan they set out to achieve and following a trend over time of how they progress, it is called Schedule Compliance Reporting. There are two tasks to perform:

• Graphically assigning and dispatching labor and crews to work orders and tasks and moving the work assignments to new dates within the short-term window in order to create an efficient use of resources. This should take into accounttravel time between work and the availability of assets or maintenance windows. It is a manual process, but easier to perform graphically. This task takes into account break-in emergency and urgent work, and which work orders are dropped out of the short-term schedule window, break-out work orders. The Graphical Assignment application of Maximo Scheduler will be used with a rolling schedule.
• Schedule Compliance Reporting is the activity that agrees and fixes a short-term schedule, normally the following week, and then monitors whether this was actually achieved at the end of the compliance window. Metrics include measuring planned total work hours versus actual work hours, the number of work orders actually completed, against the number that were planned, measuring the number of work orders that broke into the schedule, and the number that broke out of it. These metrics can be compared over time to monitor improvements in the planning and scheduling processes. It is the feature of the Graphical Scheduling application of Maximo Scheduler, which is partly the reason why you should look to achieve step 3 before ploughing straight into step 4.

Level 5

The fifth step in scheduling maturity is Schedule Optimization. If you now have the data to support planning and scheduling, and scheduling and assigning of resources can be managed manually and efficiently against resource availability, then you should review whether optimization tools can be deployed to make the schedules more efficient.

Types of Scheduling

In the discussion so far, I have assumed that when you said that you would like to improve planning and scheduling that you meant Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, but there are at least 10 other types of assigning, planning and scheduling that Maximo and the Maximo Scheduler addresses:

Crew Assignments – The daily process of fulfilling crew positions with available labor and tools, taking into accountsickness, holidays and other periods of individual or equipment unavailability. We use the Graphical Crew Assignment application which is part of Maximo Scheduler.

Repair Facility Scheduling – The process of efficiently scheduling movable assets (trains, planes, buses and trucks) into the locations and bays of a repair facility (railway shed/tracks, hanger, garage/bay). This process creates location assignments. We use the Graphical Assignment – Repair Facilities application, a part of Maximo Scheduler.

Appointment Scheduling – The process of scheduling technicians to be at a service address at a specific time slot in a workday, in order to fulfil an appointment. We use the Appointment Book Manager and Graphical Appointment Book applications, a part of Maximo Scheduler Plus.

Location, Asset or Tool Scheduling – The process of assigning and scheduling assets and tools which are consumed by a work order until they are released to be used on another work order, or the process of scheduling work in a part of a location hierarchy where from a safety point of view multiple work orders cannot take place at the same time. We use the Graphical Scheduling application of Maximo Scheduler.

Spatial Scheduling – The process of assigning and scheduling work orders that are geographically dispersed and where a key requirement is to minimise travel time for the technician or crew. This will normally require understanding where the technician/crew is at any point in time, using GPS, so that emergency work can be introduced efficiently. In Maximo, this will use Service AddressesA Service Address is a postal address and/or a record that positions a point on a map. More, Map Manager, Work Zones, Travel Time Matrix and the calculation of Street Level Routes. The Graphical Assignment application – Dispatch tab, is used to visualise the assignments.

Shutdown or Outage Management – The process of managing a set of work orders performed between two fixed points in time, a start and finish date/time. This often involves collecting the work orders together into one or more work packages, some of which may be performed in preparation for the shutdown/outage and some performed afterwards. In Maximo, we use the Graphical Scheduling application to manually assess this, but it also has capacity planning optimization to examine what work orders can be performed in the fixed period of time.

Project Planning and Scheduling – The process of managing a project against time and cost. This often involves creating several work packages which are formed into a work breakdown structure (WBS), interlaced with a cost breakdown structure (CBS), and an organisational breakdown structure (OBS). In Maximo, we use the Graphical Scheduling application, but Cost Management and Budget Monitoring are also useful tools.

Critical Path Method (CPM) Scheduling – A part of the scheduling of projects where work orders are scheduled in time based on precedence logic and start or finish constraints, assuming infinite resources; labor, crews and tools. The CPM schedule calculates a set of schedule (or early) dates (Graphical Scheduling) in a forward pass from the start date of the project. Having determined the finish date of the project a backward pass (Maximo Scheduler Plus) calculates a set of late start and finish dates. The difference between late finish and early finish is known as the total float. The work orders with zero total float forms the critical path through the project.

Resource-Levelled Schedules – A part of the scheduling of projects where a fixed availability of each resource places a limit on how many work orders can be performed at the same time. The resource-levelled schedule will be preceded by a critical path method schedule (CPM). The technique of resource levelling requires identifying the critical resources and critical work orders, setting them in time within the desired constraints of the project, and then setting a scenario that can be used for comparison purposes. Less critical resources are then added to see the effect on the schedule. The result of resource levelling may result in a revised project finish, but once agreed a snapshot is created to set a baseline. In Maximo, we use the Graphical Scheduling application ideally with resource levelling optimization.

Shift Planning and Scheduling – The processes of planning and scheduling of work where there are multiple shifts, where some work orders must be handed over from one shift to the next and other work orders can be interrupted so that the shift that started the work order continues with the work order the following work day.