Planning, Scheduling, Assignments, and Advanced Scheduling
It's important to understand the process and capabilities for planning and scheduling of existing and upcoming maintenance activity. Planning and scheduling begins before work orders are created based on historical unplanned demand, as well as planned preventative maintenance. It then continues after work order creation, both before and after release to execution, as well as during the execution of work order backlog. Assignments are optional but should be considered as part of the scheduling process in the near-term.
Historical Unplanned Demand
Unscheduled or ad hoc work orders are created to address unplanned maintenance activity on assets. It's important to consider this activity in your planning, from both a resource capacity, as well as a material availability perspective. Resource capacity is important to ensure you can cover your preventative maintenance, as well as your ad hoc maintenance. Supply chain planning is critical to ensure you have the right parts available for your preventative maintenance, as well as your forecasted unplanned demand. Ultimately, you must balance inventory carrying costs and resource payroll costs against the cost of asset downtime.
Forecast Planning and Scheduling
If you use maintenance programs to create work orders for preventative maintenance work, then planning begins with the generation of the forward-looking maintenance forecast. You should review upcoming forecast due dates for your locations to get a better idea of you near-term planned maintenance, while understanding that mid-term and long-term demand will most likely continue to dynamically adjust over time, due to meter updates and actual completion of previous due dates. This can help with understanding your upcoming workload, including resource demand.
The Forecast page provides limited options for helping to smooth demand in the near-term, such as allowing you to set an alternative work order start date. For example, to shift work forward or back during peak demand periods, shutdowns, and holidays. This is helpful, but time a consuming process that doesn’t scale. You also need to understand that setting an alternative start date stops the forecast for that due date, preventing dynamic recalculation until its work order is completed.
Optionally, you can create informative OTBI analysis and reports to provide a summary as well.
For additional details, see the How You Manage Maintenance Forecasts and OTBI for Oracle Maintenance topics.
Work Order Scheduling
Work orders are automatically scheduled after creation using the unconstrained scheduling engine. This provides general scheduling functionality to push or pull the start dates around based on the organization schedule, facility calendars and shifts, and number of resources per work center. It doesn't provide scheduling based on the actual availability of individual people or material demand but provides basic forward and backward scheduling based off the requested start or completion dates. After creation, you can then manually adjust work order start dates based on your available capacity.
Additionally, work orders created for preventative maintenance are created all at the same time on each due date, by default 8 AM. You can optionally adjust this time in the work requirement definition, but typically you will see an overload of these types of work orders all starting at the same time on each due date. This requires manual rescheduling to smooth the demand during peak periods.
For aditional details, see the How Maintenance Work Orders are Scheduled by Default topic.
Production Scheduling
During work order initial scheduling, the unconstrained engine calculates start times and end times based on the work order start or completion date, while accounting only for the duration of each operation resource’s required usage. However, it assumes that your resources have unlimited capacity, usually resulting in multiple work orders being created and scheduled simultaneously on the same date and times. It also doesn’t consider material availability.
Using Oracle Production Scheduling, you can programmatically generate a feasible and executable schedule by considering resource capacity, as well as material availability. This can help to smooth your maintenance schedule in the near-term horizon, avoiding peaks and valleys, and helping you absorb unplanned maintenance while producing a rough-cut schedule. Otherwise, you must use manual rescheduling to smooth the demand during peak periods.
Production can be used directly in the application, or you can also invoke it from Maintenance using a scheduled process, as covered in the Enable Work Orders Scheduling and Resources Assignment topic of the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide.
Additional details about production scheduling are covered in the Using Production Scheduling guide.
Work Order Assignments
After you schedule work orders over a near-term horizon, you can optionally manually assign resources. With this, you can divide the work order demand across your technicians, so they can prioritize their work in the My Maintenance Work page.
Assignments are managed in the Maintenance Supervision page, using the Schedule and Assignment tabs, to efficiently find and assign resources to work orders. This is a manual process, for each work order, operation, and unique resource that doesn’t scale for larger numbers of work orders.
Additional details are covered in the Maintenance Supervision chapter in this guide.
Automated Work Order Assignments
The assignments process been traditionally very time consuming, requiring you to edit each work order and assign resource instances at the individual operation resource level on a work order. To programmatically create bulk assignments, consider using the Schedule and Assign Resources to Maintenance Work Orders scheduled process.
The process is run by each organization, for a future horizon by number of days, allowing you to create new assignments, refresh existing assignments, or remove the existing assignments. When creating new assignments, the application evaluates each work order in the schedule window, identifies resources that don't have assignments, and finds available resources. Resources must have a resource instance defined for the resource and must not already be assigned during the same day and time.
It's important to note that this assignment capability doesn't consider a user’s work schedule or unavailable time, nor skills beyond resource definition, but does provide a basic automatic assignment capability. Additionally, they must not exceed the daily scheduled percentage asset maintenance parameter, which is defaulted to 80%, but can be adjusted.
If you use Production Scheduling, then you can use the same scheduled process to first schedule the work orders, then consider assignments.
Additional details are covered in the Enable Work Orders Scheduling and Resources Assignment topic of the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide.
Advanced Scheduling and Assignment
If you require a constrained work order scheduling process, based on person-level availability, use advanced scheduling for an organization. Advanced scheduling leverages Fusion Field Service to assign and schedule work orders based off actual resource availability in the near-term scheduling window, up to 30 days into the future. Only work orders in organizations enabled for advanced scheduling can utilize this solution.
You'll continue to model your standard operations, work definitions and work orders with resources and resource instances. Maintenance resources and resource instances (at a person level), who are granted the Dispatch List privilege will be synced to Oracle Field Service as Maintenance Resources. You will then configure each person with their actual work calendar, including days on/off, daily shifts, lunch, and unavailable time per day. After they have their schedule set, they are available for scheduling and assignment.
After work orders are created and initial scheduled by the unconstrained engine, you can release and schedule them for assignment over an upcoming window of time in days for each organization. The application schedules each person down to the operation resource level, updating the operation and work order dates. You can view the results in the Maintenance Supervision and My Maintenance Work pages.
Additional details are covered in the Advanced Scheduling and Assignment topic in this guide and the Enable Work Orders Scheduling and Resources Assignment topic of the Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management guide.