Concepts

Tasks

Settings

Setting Up Scheduling

Once you have planned work order tasks, you can schedule them and assign them to trades and employees. Before you begin using the scheduling function, you should consider the following questions:

What time periods do you need to schedule for?

You can set up the scheduling function to either give a broad overview of tasks and employee availability on a monthly or weekly basis or give a very detailed analysis on a shift-to-shift basis.

If you do not need a lot of detail, you can create your schedules from scratch as you need them. On the other hand, if you need to track tasks and employee availability for each day or shift, you should create a set of schedule templates and use them to create your schedules.

To create a set of schedule templates, see Creating a Set of Schedule Templates.

How will you manage your schedules and schedule templates?

If you are working with multiple schedules and schedule templates, you can view them from the Work Management view, Schedules tab. The best way to do this is to create a top level schedule that will act as a placeholder for the parent schedule. The same approach applies for schedule templates.

For example, a scheduler named Jane could create a top schedule template called “Jane's Schedule Templates.” If Jane has a set of regular schedule templates that she uses every week and a set of shutdown schedule templates, she can place both sets of templates under “Jane's Schedule Templates.” Both sets of schedule templates appear on the Work Management view, Schedules tab, Templates tab. Jane could also create a top schedule for all of her working schedules named “Jane's Schedules.”

To create the top schedule and top template for an employee, see Creating the Top Schedule Template and Top Schedule for a Scheduler.

How will you track employee and trade availability on schedules?

You can set up APM to track the availability of each employee for each schedule. There are two ways to calculate employee availability for a schedule:

•	using employee work schedules

•	using maintenance group assignments

Note: To use the employee work schedule option, you must import employee work schedules from your corporate human resources or employee scheduling system. This feature must be set up by your Implementation Consultant. If you cannot import work schedules, they can be entered manually via each employee’s record, however this could be a time-consuming process.

You can also track availability at the trade level. To do this, you must enter the total availability for each trade on each schedule. There are two methods to accomplish this:

•	Enter the trade availability on each schedule.

•	Enter default availability levels on your schedule templates, which are then copied onto each schedule created from the template.

For more information, see Working with Employee and Resource Availability.