Understanding Large Jobs in Crew Scheduling

The scheduling of large jobs typically covers multiple work orders, labor detail steps, crews, or schedule periods, or a combination of these. With this type of job, the work has been broken down into smaller tasks that are managed and scheduled separately, but need to be viewed together to illustrate the relationship between the tasks and the schedule periods. You can use two methods to individually track smaller parts of a large job.

First, you can use parent/child work orders. The parent/child work order structure is used to create a group of related work orders that are to be carried out against different business units or equipment for tracking costs and history. Multiple child work orders are created, each representing a part of the larger job. These work orders are all grouped under a parent work order, which represents the larger job as a whole.

Second, you can break down the pieces of a large job on a single work order using labor detail steps. Each step on the work order can be scheduled separately, using different crews and equipment. You must be able to search and filter by the parent work order number and view the associated child work orders and associated labor detail steps if scheduling at that level. The Schedule by Work Order program enables you to view projects using parent/child associations, and also to view labor detail steps that are associated with a work order.

During the planning or scheduling process, the work requires multiple crews or schedule periods to complete the work. This requires the scheduler to access the work order labor detail program and create new steps for the work and split the estimated hours based on the scope for each new step. By splitting the labor detail steps, the scheduler can assign a crew and resources to the individual steps and monitor progress and schedule compliance at this level.

You use the Manage Schedule program to locate work orders and to break down the labor detail steps. You can use the link to the Unscheduled Work program, where you can select either the first step or all current steps planned on the job. You can use the More Row Actions option to access the Labor Detail program (P17732) to break a job down into multiple steps. To break a job into multiple steps, you can create a new operation step and split the estimated hours as required. Each step should have a clear description so that verifying the completion of a step can be easily verified, especially if you are splitting work over multiple schedule periods.

When the labor detail steps are defined, you can click the Work Order link from the Manage Schedule program to access the Schedule By Work Order program. Use this program to review and schedule the labor detail steps for a work order, and to review the parent/child work order relationships. Select each labor detail line to assign a crew and schedule period to the task.

You can move work that is already scheduled to a different crew or schedule period by selecting the labor detail step and updating the crew or schedule period.