Advanced Scheduling and Assignment

Oracle Maintenance leverages Fusion Field Service to deliver a seamless advanced scheduling and assignment solution. You to can plan, schedule, and assign qualified people to work orders considering their actual resource availability in the near-term scheduling window, up to 30 days into the future. You can view and manage their assignments in the Maintenance Supervision page, and technicians can use the My Maintenance Work page for view reporting of their qualified and assigned work orders.

To use this solution, you must license Fusion Field Service by enabling the offering and provisioning at least one administrative user. Additional details are covered in the Enable Work Orders Scheduling and Resources Assignment topic of the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide.

After that, enable maintenance-only organizations for advanced scheduling.

Scheduling Overview

To schedule work orders based on resource availability, define resource requirements for all work order count-point operations. The resources can be predefined in standard operations or work definitions, or manually defined directly in the work order. A resource not only identifies the job category or skill set required to accomplish a sequence step within an operation, but also the step's expected duration and number of people required. The sum of the total duration of each resource sequence step rolls up to the operation level to define its total duration. Each operation then rolls up to the work order to define the total duration. Therefore, resource definitions within a work order ultimately drive the planning and scheduling of a work order using a bottom-up scheduling method, based on the assignment of available resources.

It's generally expected that an organization must have enough resources defined and available for scheduling to reasonably meet demand over the scheduling horizon. It's also expected that initial planning and scheduling smoothes out peaks and valleys in demand. Otherwise, work is either pushed into the future or isn't scheduled in the requested horizon in days. Manual scheduling and assignment may be required when demand exceeds available resources to schedule and assign to upcoming work.

Note:

Only count-point operations are considered for assignment. Automatic or optional operations, which aren't generally recommended for maintenance, aren't considered for assignment.

Note:

Operations without resources have zero duration and aren't considered for scheduling. If they fall between other operations that are scheduled, then they are adjusted accordingly when the work order is rescheduled, but they are never considered for assignment.

Resource and User Setup

Resources must be defined for each maintenance organization and work center to represent the job category or skill set required to accomplish a sequence step within an operation. Within the resource definition, you must also have one or more resource instances (users) defined to support scheduling and assignment.

Each user must also be assigned the Maintenance Technician role to be considered by the solution. After you have provisioned and setup the Fusion Field Service application by following the instructions in the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide, all users who have this privilege are automatically synchronized as a maintenance resource. When a user is visible as maintenance resource, an Administrator and Manager role in Fusion Field Service can ensure that they have the correct work schedule, shift definition and lunch periods (if defined). Then, they are available for scheduling and assignment to maintenance work orders.

HCM Skills aren't considered by advanced scheduling. A user is considered qualified if they have a resource instance defined and are available for scheduling.

Operation Resource Modeling

As mentioned earlier, resource requirements are required for count-point operations for scheduling and assignment. They are also required for an operation to be assigned and completed in the My Maintenance Work page. If count-point operations aren't defined with a resource, then a user can’t be assigned to the operations or complete them. This is a core requirement of using advanced scheduling.

One or more resources requirements can also be defined in an operation, for the same resource or different resources, using unique sequences. Thus, an operation can be subdivided into individual steps by different jobs categories or skills. Advanced scheduling considers each resource sequence within an operation for scheduling and assignment. If more than one sequence is found, this could restrict the ability for the scheduling to split the assignment into more than one block, push an operation to another shift or day, etc. Therefore, it may be more beneficial from a scheduling opportunity perspective to model operations with a single resource sequence only to improve assignment.

Additionally, you may define the need for more than 1 assigned unit (person) per resource sequence. The scheduler looks to assign the sequence to different users, which requires all of them to be available during the same block of time. Therefore, careful consider should be taken when assigning more than 1 unit in a resource sequence as this could limit the scheduling opportunities.

Request Scheduling by Organization

For each organization, you can submit the Request Maintenance Work Orders Advanced Scheduling and Assignments scheduled process for with a time horizon number of days (including the current day). The number of days window consider the planned start and end dates of the work orders, but also any additional days in which work could be pushed into the future. Too narrow of a window could result in work orders not getting scheduled, while too large of a window could push work orders too far into the future. The process is also limited to a 30-day window.

Note: It's generally recommended to schedule the process for each organization before work begins today or at the end of the workday before the next day’s shifts begin. If the process is run during an active shift, before some or all the work order reporting is completed, it could result in-progress work getting rescheduled until later today or days in the future.

After the scheduling process ends, you can view the results in the Maintenance Supervision page.

How it Works

The process gathers all asset-based work orders of type preventative or corrective, that are in Released status, have at least one count point operation with a resource requirement, and a planned start date before or within the scheduling window. It excludes any work orders that are scheduled as firmed or firmed with existing assignments, as well as excluding operations that have started reporting in execution.

Only single asset work orders can be considered for advanced scheduling. Work orders that support multiple assets aren't considered.

Note:

Each work order is evaluated for existing or new assignments, based on the resource requirements, number of requested people, and duration, and these prioritization criteria:

Criteria used in advanced scheduling

Crietria	How it's used
Work Order Priority	If a priority is defined, then it's weighed accordingly: 1 is the highest and is considered first 99 as the lowest and is considered last If no priority is defined, or a value less than 99 is defined, it's considered as if 99 were defined.
Planned Start Date	The application tries to schedule the work order first on this date, otherwise it pushes it into the future. It doesn't schedule before this date, thereby it doesn't allow pulling of work forward, because it only pushes work into the future.
Planned Completion Date	The application tries not to partially schedule a work order, if possible, in the scheduling window. If the planned completion date falls outside of the window, then the application may skip a work order instead of recommending partial assignment. You may need to extend the scheduling window number of days to increase assignment success based on work order duration, volume of work, and available resource capacity.
Preventative Maintenance Due Date	If defined, the application tries not to exceed this date during scheduling.
Multiple Operations with the same resource in a work order	The application tries to schedule the same user or users to the same work order to both optimize their schedule and ensure continuous execution for the same work order.
Multiple work orders for the same asset	During the scheduling window, the application tries to schedule work for a common asset on the same date and even the same user, if possible.
Operations that have started	Operations that have a user actively clocked in, having reported time, or completed are considered started and not considered for scheduling and assignment. These operations indicate an actual start date and time in the Operations tab.
Existing Assignments	Existing assignments for a user are considered and weighed compared the other criteria above. The application may also calculate a better scheduling outcome by reassigning a user or unassigning and assigning them to another operation or work order to improve scheduling. This may also be true when a higher priority work order is found during a future scheduling run.
Lunch or other unavailable time	The application respects unavailable time periods for users during scheduling. It may split an operation into one or more segments, creating unique time block assignments for one or more users to maximize their scheduling and assignment availability. For example, if an operation resource spans for 6 hours, a user may be assigned 4 hours before lunch and 2 after lunch, representing 1 assignment with 2 time blocks.

Each user is considered for scheduling and assignment evaluation first based on their work schedule of shifts, existing assignments, and any unavailable time periods. The solution uses a set of proprietary scheduling algorithms to distribute the work efficiently and effectively across each user, trying to maximize their scheduling opportunities while weighing the scheduling criteria listed above. When the application has achieved the best overall scheduling outcome, it returns a list of scheduling recommendations. This includes recommendations for new assignments, reassigning existing assignments to different users, as well as unassigning users from existing assignments. The outcome may also not return any recommendations for a work order, leaving it at its current assignment status.

The recommendations are used to update each work order from the bottom up. This includes creating, updating, or deleting assignments at the resource sequence level, while also rescheduling it. After each resource sequence is updated, the operation is also rescheduled accordingly. After each operation sequence is updated, the work order is also rescheduled accordingly. Thus, after all the assignment recommendations are considered for a work order, its rescheduling and assignment is complete.

If all the resources in a work order were assigned, its assignment status is set as Assigned. Otherwise, its status is set as Partially Assigned or Unassigned. This is helpful for viewing and sorting work orders page. Additionally, a scheduled and assigned work order gets its scheduling method option automatically set to User or external system. This prevents the unconstrained scheduled from considering it. Additionally details for viewing or managing assignments are covered later in this section.

If the demand for resources exceeds the available capacity during the scheduling horizon, then work orders aren't be assigned and existing work orders could even become unassigned. This is an expected outcome, based on the scheduling criteria listed above. If you find work orders aren't assigned over several runs of the scheduling process, you should consider giving them a priority value, or raising their existing priority to elevate their likelihood of being schedule and assigned. Additionally, if you're firming the schedule and assignment options on work orders with no or a low priority, you constrain the available pool of resources to assign. Therefore, careful consideration of setting these options is required, given that they lock in any existing assignments and prevent reassignment or unassignment.

User Experience

View and manage assignments in the Maintenance Supervision page. You can view assignment status, as well as the details on each user who was assigned by the scheduling process. You can manually adjust the assigned users as required. Additionally, there are several administrative functions for managing the reporting of work.

Technicians use the My Maintenance Work page for view reporting of their qualified and assigned work orders. They can optionally clock in and clock out of work order operations to provide real-time execution and reporting.

Additional details are covered in the Maintenance Supervision and Execute My Maintenance Work chapters in this guide.