Understanding Crew Scheduling
This section discusses:
Crew scheduling.
Crew scheduling setup requirements.
The crew scheduling process.
Many maintenance organizations and organizations that perform large capital projects prefer to schedule crews for work orders in specific periods rather than to schedule individual labor resources. Schedulers must be able to determine the availability and capacity of a crew to appropriately allocate its resources to specific work order tasks. After scheduling crews to work orders, organizations need to measure and analyze statistics about each crew's compliance with the schedule in order to plan realistically for future periods.
To perform the overall crew scheduling process, users:
Set up for crew scheduling.
Plan crew capacity.
Schedule crews and distribute reports.
Assign crew and individual technicians to work orders.
Capture schedule compliance statistics.
Before you can schedule a crew, you must set up:
User preferences
Select options on the Maintenance Management page to enable specific users to perform activities related to crew scheduling.
Employee and labor resources
All resources, including crew members, identified in a shop must be set up as a resource in PeopleSoft Maintenance Management. Users must follow all the setup requirements for employees, including setting up a resource schedule for each resource.
See Setting Up Labor and Tools Resources
Important! Be sure to run the Set Up Financials/Supply Chain, Common Definitions, Resource Search, Cache Administration process to ensure that any new resources are made available for scheduling.
Crafts
You must set up crafts before you set up crews. Crew members are set up based on their primary craft, and they are scheduled by craft.
See Define Crafts Page.
Shifts
You must set up shifts and assign a shift to each resource who is assigned to a crew.
Schedule patterns and periods
Crews are normally scheduled for specific time periods, which are created based on a pattern of time, such as daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly. To plan crew capacity for a specific period, you must identify a schedule pattern, such as weekly, generate a series of schedule periods based on a period start date, and assign a schedule pattern and period to the crew.
See Understanding Shifts, Schedule Patterns and Periods, Shops, and Crews.
Shops
Each crew belongs to only one shop. Each crew member is identified as a resource in the shop. You must identify a shop when you set up a crew, which means that you must set up your shops before you set up your crews. When you assign a crew to a shop, the crew is updated in the shop.
Crews
You set up a crew for a specific business unit and shop, and associate it with a schedule pattern. You also identify the crew members and the percentage of time each can work on this crew.
Crew rescheduling reason codes
When you reschedule a crew, you need to identify the reason for the rescheduling.
See Understanding Shifts, Schedule Patterns and Periods, Shops, and Crews.
The crew scheduling process includes:
Setting up crew data.
Creating work orders and work order task requirements.
Creating a crew capacity plan.
Using the Crew Scheduling Workbench to schedule crews and update the schedule metrics. Crews are scheduled to work order task labor requirement lines based on the crew capacity plan.
Using the Labor Assignment Workbench to assign crew members and individual technicians to the work order task labor schedule lines.
Reviewing and analyzing the crew schedule metrics, reports, and the rescheduling history.
Reporting time for each labor resource and for the crew.
Creating Work Orders and Work Order Task Requirements
Use one of these methods to create work orders and work order requirements that use crews:
Create a work order using the Work Order component.
When you create a work order, if crew scheduling is enabled for the shop associated with the work order, then the primary crew of the shop appears as the default preferred crew on the work order task. Alternatively, if you selected an asset that has a shop and crew associated with it, this crew is provided by default as the preferred crew.
Set up a Preventive Maintenance (PM) schedule and use the Preventive Maintenance process to generate work orders that use crews.
Regardless of the method by which the work order is created, you must access the Work Order component to define the task requirements for the work orders to which you intend to schedule a crew. If you selected the Schedule Crew check box on the Shop Information page and associated a crew with the shop, then the system assigns the shop's primary crew, which is defined as the default preferred crew on the work order task. You can override this crew with another crew and override the shop for the task, if necessary. If the asset identified on the work order task has its own preferred crew specified in the asset definition, then the system assigns this crew (not the shop's primary crew) to the work order task by default. However, the crew associated with the asset must belong to the shop associated with the work order for this override to occur.
The Labor Requirements grid has a Crew Assignments tab and a Crew Timetable tab. You add the requirement rows based on each craft for each task in the work order. The craft, quantity, and hours that you enter as requirement rows appear on the Crew Assignment and Crew Timetable tabs. The system does not update remaining fields on these grids; instead, you schedule the crews on the Crew Scheduling Workbench. When you access the Crew Scheduling Workbench and search for the labor requirement rows associated with the crew specified in the work order, these rows are listed in the Crew Scheduling Workbench for that crew.
Crew Capacity Plan
You create a crew capacity plan to determine the total capacity of a crew and the capacity of each craft associated with the crew along with the potential cost and revenue amounts that will be generated by the craft for a future scheduled period.
Initially, the crew capacity plan displays the total base capacity and adjusted capacity values for the entire crew and the base capacity and adjusted capacity for each craft defined for the crew. The system derives the base capacity from the shift associated with the crew members, and it derives the adjusted capacity from the calendar of the crew members stored in the resource availability cache. The crew supervisor updates the adjusted capacity figures based on information that the crew members provide as to why they will not be available for as many hours as their shift suggests. This information provides the scheduler with an accurate baseline capacity to use when scheduling the next period using the Crew Scheduling Workbench. The crew capacity plan is the foundation for calculating the values that appear in the capacity grid on the Crew Scheduling Workbench. When you create a crew capacity plan for a period, this capacity information appears in the Crew Scheduling Workbench for that period, with additional fields that are updated based on the creation of crew schedules.
See Perform Crew Capacity Planning
Important! Oracle recommends running the cache administration process once a day and every time you add new resources or change resource shifts.
Crew Scheduling Workbench
The Crew Scheduling Workbench enables a scheduler to avoid the burden of scheduling each individual technician by scheduling entire crews based on their availability by craft to work on tasks in specific periods. Scheduling crews in this way also establishes the schedule metrics by crew and craft, which can be used for future completion analysis. After completing the crew scheduling for a period, the craft supervisor can access the Labor Assignment Workbench to assign crew members, as well as non-crew members, to the scheduled work order tasks.
The Crew Schedule Workbench enables you to:
Display a crew's capacity plan by craft.
Schedule crews to multiple work orders for a period.
Search for unscheduled work.
Search for and schedule crew carryover work.
Access preventive maintenance projections.
Access labor, inventory, purchase/on-hand, and tool resources defined for work orders to determine the resources that are defined for each work order task.
Cancel and reschedule work.
Enter reason codes and descriptions of rescheduled work.
Freeze (confirm) the schedule and save any updates applicable to the crew schedule metrics.
Labor Assignment Workbench
Once you schedule a crew to work order tasks for a specific period on the Crew Scheduling Workbench and you create the labor schedules in the work order, you can use the Labor Assignment Workbench to assign each crew member to the scheduled tasks. When you search for work order tasks for a specific crew and period in the Labor Assignment Workbench, the system displays all of the labor schedule rows that were scheduled to the crew for the period in the Crew Scheduling Workbench. You can also display and assign non-crew scheduled labor schedule rows in the Labor Assignment Workbench and make labor assignments.
When you access the Labor Assignment Workbench, a resource availability grid displays the availability and load of each crew member for each day of the schedule period. If labor schedule rows exist for this crew, they display below the Availability grid. When you assign employees to the labor schedule rows or change the schedule dates or hours in the rows, the Availability grid is automatically updated. When you save the Labor Assignment Workbench page, the system updates the labor schedule rows in the work orders and updates the resource calendar with the new assignments.
Use the Labor Assignment Workbench to:
Assign individual crew resources to the crew scheduled tasks.
Assign individual non-crew resources to scheduled work order tasks.
Review the available hours of individual resources.
Reschedule work to a different resource, regardless of the resource's primary craft.
Search, select, and display work order labor schedules by period.
Cancel resource assignments.
Search for labor resources and display their capacity, load, and tasks assigned each day.
Crew Schedule Metrics and Reports
Crew schedule metrics are generated based on activities performed in the Crew Scheduling Workbench. Schedulers can use these values to determine how well the crews complied with the schedule for the scheduling period. These metrics assist the scheduler in determining a more accurate target load percentage, which is the target value used to reduce the expected availability of the crew to allow for unscheduled events for future periods.
Schedulers can update the adjusted completed schedule hours and the adjusted completed hours within the Crew Schedule Metrics component. They can also view graphic representations of the overall schedule completion data and the schedule completion by craft data.
In addition to the crew schedule metrics, you can also obtain the Schedule Completion report, which describes how well the crews comply with the schedule for the period. This report enables you to determine:
Unscheduled and emergency work that was completed within a period.
Completed scheduled work.
Scheduled work that was not completed and becomes carryover work.
These Crew Schedule reports are also available:
Crew Capacity report
This report describes the crew's base capacity, adjusted capacity, target load percentage, and schedule compliance percentage by lead craft for a specified schedule period.
Schedule and Assignment report
This report describes the workload by craft within each crew and, when you select the Include Detail option, it provides information about the employees assigned to each task.
Crew Unscheduled Work report
This report lists all of the work order tasks that are currently not scheduled by crew.
Crew Carryover Work report
This report describes the work order tasks that were crew scheduled in a previous period but are not yet completed. These tasks must be rescheduled by carrying the hours over to the next period.