Generate Maintenance Forecasts for Work Requirements and Assets

Maintenance programs define and generate a preventive maintenance forecast for one or more affected assets in a maintenance-enabled organization. The forecast is then used as the basis for creating preventative maintenance work orders, thus reducing the workload for maintenance planners and allowing them to focus on maintenance program auditing, optimization, and exception-based events. Forecasts are created and updated for a program using the Generate Forecast action in the program header page, affected assets page, or by directly running the Generate Maintenance Forecast scheduled process.

The scheduled process calculates the forecast for all assets in the program over the forecast windows. If your program contains many work requirements and assets, the processing time may be lengthy. With this update, you can control how the forecast is generated at a program level, work requirement level, and asset level. Additionally, the Generate Maintenance Forecast scheduled process can now deploy child workers to improve processing time for programs containing thousands of work requirements and affected assets.

Generate Forecast for Work Requirements and Included Assets

Generate a forecast for a work requirement or only for an included asset within the work requirement's affected asset list. You can create or edit a work requirement and refresh its forecast without generating the forecast for the entire program. The improved response time allows you to evaluate the forecast due date results more quickly.

Here's a screenshot that shows the new Generate Forecast button at the top of the Work Requirement page.

Generate Forecast Button on the Work Requirement Page

Here's a screenshot that shows the actions at the top of the Assets page and at the row level for an included asset. The actions dropdown includes Generate Forecast, Generate Requirement Forecast, and Create Work Orders.

Generate Requirement Forecast Action on the Assets Page

When you click the Generate Forecast button, a scheduled process is run. You get a confirmation message as shown in this screenshot.

Confirmation of scheduled process

After the job successfully completes, you see an updated forecast in the Gantt chart, calendar of Manage Forecasts page.  When the forecast is generated again at the program level, the incrementally updated forecast rows are recreated again along with the rest of the program.

Generate Forecast and Work Orders for a Program

With the new actions to calculate the forecast, you can disable the option to generate forecast for an entire program. This runs only incremental refreshes of new or edited work requirements within a program and eliminates unnecessary recalculation and recreation of forecast due dates for other work requirements across the program, thus improving the performance. However, we recommend you to set up the Generate Maintenance Forecasts process once a day during a low activity time to process and automatically refresh the entire program's forecast.

You can also disable the generation of work orders for a program. If you do so, schedule the Generate Maintenance Work Orders process once a day during a low activity time. Run this process after the Generate Maintenance Forecast process successfully ends so that the new work orders are created based on the forecast due dates and the future creation window defined in days. Alternatively, you can disable this action from the Manage Forecasts page to manually create specific work orders for asset due dates in between scheduled jobs.

Actions button on the Manage Forecasts Page

Improvements in the Generate Maintenance Forecast Process

To improve performance we recommend to select No for the Asset Maintenance Parameter option, Allow Suppress and Merge across Work Requirements in a Maintenance Program.

If the process finds large number of work requirements and affected assets, the Generate Maintenance Forecast process can deploy additional child workers to improve processing time. By default, the application deploys a single worker but if more than 2000 work requirement-asset combinations are detected in a program, a second worker is automatically deployed.

If you experience long processing times due to a large number work requirements and of assets within a program, as an administrator, you can increase the number of child workers that can be deployed to optimize the performance.

You can now create, edit, or refresh a forecast for a work requirement without recalculating the entire forecast for a program. Also, you can disable manual generation of maintenance forecast for one or more programs. These new capabilities reduce processing time and result in a better user experience.

Steps to Enable

The new actions to generate the forecast for a work requirement or only for an included asset within the work requirement's affected asset list will only be enabled if the Asset Maintenance Parameter option Allow Suppress and Merge across Work Requirements in a Maintenance Program is set to No. Here's a screenshot of the Manage Asset Maintenance Parameters page that highlights the parameter.

Asset Maintenance Parameter Option Allow Suppress and Merge across Work Requirements in a Maintenance Program

We recommend setting this parameter to No, thereby disabling this capability unless you have an established business requirement and fully understand its capability and limitations. Merge and suppress options that support multiple work definitions across intervals in a cycle are best modeled and forecast within a single work requirement.

The actions to generate the forecast or work orders from the program page can be individually disabled if their parameters are set to No.

Parameters to Disable Functionality from the Maintenance Program page

An administrator can set a number of workers using the Manage Administrator Profile Values task for this profile option:

• Profile Option Name: ORA_MNT_PROGRAM_NUM_WORKERS
• Profile Option Description: Number of Enterprise Scheduler Service Workers to be spawned for the Maintenance Program Jobs.

We recommend increasing the number of workers between 3 and a maximum value of 10. You should start at a value of 3, then increment one worker at a time, verifying improvement or not in the processing time.

Tips And Considerations

The performance of the Generate Maintenance Forecasts scheduled process is driven by a combination of the number of work requirements, included assets, forecast modeling options, and length of forecast window in days. It's recommended to model multiple programs instead of a single program if large volumes of assets and work requirements are involved.

Access Requirements

No additional user roles or privileges are required to use this feature.