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Scheduling Concepts 

This topic explains how scheduling works in APM and the concepts you need to know to create and work with schedules.

Once you have planned work order tasks, you can schedule them. There are two types of scheduling in APM: simple schedules and availability schedules.

Simple Schedules

Simple schedules provide the basic scheduling functionality for maintenance groups that perform small, relatively straightforward jobs. Using simple schedules, you can schedule tasks for a specific date or during a specific week without having to manage multiple schedules and track availability.

With simple schedules, you do not need to create templates or a schedule hierarchy. Just assign planned work order tasks to a maintenance group and then set the planned start date or work week. You cannot specify the time when the work should be done or how long it will take, and you cannot track the availability of requirements.

When you schedule work order tasks assigned to a maintenance group that is set to use simple schedules, APM uses the simple schedule by default. Maintenance groups and tradespeople can view the work order tasks assigned to them using the My Desk view.

When you set up your maintenance groups in APM, you must decide if they will use availability schedules or simple schedules. A maintenance group that uses simple schedules can still use availability schedules when necessary (to schedule a major maintenance shutdown, for example).

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Availability Schedules

Availability schedules offer full functionality. You can assign work order tasks to trades and employees, track which employees or maintenance groups are available to complete the tasks, and set when work order tasks will be started and completed.

If you use availability schedules regularly, you must create new sets of schedules for each new period of time that you want to schedule. This is easy to do if you set up template schedules. You can create a set of related template schedules as a hierarchy. In this way, you can see how the schedules relate to each other and easily add and move tasks from one schedule to another.

The rest of this topic discusses concepts related to availability schedules.

Scheduling Work

In APM, you can create a set of schedules defined for specific periods of time (such as one week). Each schedule can have pre-defined availability levels (number of hours available) for each trade and employee.

After the asset maintenance programs have been set up, you can generate a work backlog. This is a list of work order tasks that have been planned and need to be done. By adding tasks from the work backlog to your schedules, you can put the tasks into time slots and assign the tasks to maintenance groups, trades, and specific employees. As you schedule work, APM can track the schedule’s availability (hours available, hours scheduled, hours remaining) by trade and by employee.

If necessary, you can override the trade requirements (number of hours a tradesperson will need to spend) on a task for a schedule. For example, you might split a 12-hour task over two shift schedules. Trade requirements are added to work order tasks during the work planning stage.

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Schedule Hierarchies

You can organize a set of schedules as a hierarchy. The hierarchy structure allows you to quickly see how the schedules are related to each other. When you use a set of schedule templates to create a set of schedules, the new schedules are automatically organized in a hierarchy.

For example, using a set of schedule templates you can create a weekly schedule, 7 daily schedules, and 21 or more shift schedules in one step. Below is a diagram of a typical set of schedules in a hierarchy.

Once you create a set of schedules, you can perform functions between each schedule in the hierarchy. These functions include:

•	Transferring tasks from a parent to a child schedule. For example, you can transfer tasks from a weekly to a daily, or from a daily to a shift.

•	Moving tasks between peers. For example, you can move open work from the previous day to the next day’s schedule.

You can add new or existing schedules to a hierarchy or move schedules around in the hierarchy at any time.

For an example of a more complex schedule hierarchy, see Setting up Schedule Templates for a 28-Day (4-Week) Shift Rotation.

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Schedule Templates

If you schedule work on a regular basis (such as every week), you will need to create a new set of schedules for each period of time (that is, for each week). Using schedule templates can simplify this process.

For example if you schedule work on a week-to-week basis, you will need to create a new set of schedules every week. Using a schedule template, you can create the weekly schedule, 7 daily schedules, and 21 or more shift schedules in one step. APM uses the information defined on the templates to create the appropriate set of schedules.

You do not have to use schedule templates. All of the scheduling features, including defining schedule hierarchies, are available whether or not you use schedule templates, with one exception: a schedule template is necessary to use automatic scheduling with standard jobs.

After you have created a template, you must set its properties. You can do this when you create the template or at any time afterwards. The schedule template properties tell APM the following about schedules created from the template:

•	How to calculate the time period that the schedules will cover

•	How to name the schedules

•	The maintenance groups and shifts that the schedules will apply to

•	How employee and trade availability will be calculated

•	Which tabs to display on the schedule worksheet

•	What default MS Project values to use

When you create a child or peer template, APM copies the properties from the original template to the new template. You should check the settings on each new template to make sure that they are correct.

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Schedule Template Hierarchy

Schedule templates are defined as a hierarchy, similar to the actual schedule hierarchy. The hierarchy describes the relationship between the different schedule templates.

For example, if you are using weekly, daily, and shift schedules, you will create 29 schedule templates (1 weekly template, 7 daily templates, and 21 shift templates at 3 shifts per day) to define one full set of schedules. When a new weekly schedule is created from the weekly template, APM also creates the 7 daily schedules and 21 shift templates using the template hierarchy.

At first glance the number of templates required for a full set of schedules might appear intimidating. However, you only have to define the templates once. When the templates are complete, APM has the information required to create all of the schedules.

Offset Start Dates Within a Schedule Template Hierarchy

You can create sets of schedule templates that do not follow a regular weekly pattern.

For example, consider an organization where 4 maintenance groups are working 12-hour shifts, and the shift rotation repeats every 28 days.

To accommodate this situation, 4 sets of schedule templates are created to cover each 7-day period within the 28 days.

When you set up these templates, you need to tell APM when to start each of the 4 weekly schedules in relation to the start of the 28-day schedule. For example, you would enter an offset time of 0 days for the 1st week, 7 days for the 2nd week, 14 days for the 3rd week, and 21 days for week 4:

In the 28-day rotation example, you would not need to enter an offset for the “4-week Rotation” template, however you would enter an offset for the weekly template level. The child templates below each weekly template do not need an offset.

Use the start date offset on a template when:

•	The template is for a unique weekly schedule within a monthly schedule group (for example, week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4)

•	The template is for a turn schedule within a rotation schedule group that is longer than 7 days

You do not need to use the start date offset on a template when:

•	The schedules reoccur every 7 days or within a seven-day pattern (for example, every Monday); that is, if every weekly schedule in the group is the same

•	Templates for daily and shift schedules are part of a template structure with a weekly or turn template. It is not necessary to specify an offset on the daily or shift templates because their start dates are controlled by the weekly/turn schedule dates.

•	The template is the parent template in the monthly or rotation schedules

For complete instructions on setting up templates for this example, see Setting up Schedule Templates for a 28-Day (4-Week) Shift Rotation.

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Scheduling Standard Jobs Automatically

Standard jobs can be set up so that work orders generated from a standard job are automatically scheduled. Automatic scheduling reduces the effort required to develop your maintenance schedules. You can set up automatic scheduling both for maintenance groups that use simple scheduling and those that use availability scheduling.

If the job’s maintenance group uses availability scheduling, you must select a Schedule template.

With automatic availability scheduling, when a work order is generated from a standard job, APM checks for an existing schedule for the work order’s planned start date. Only schedules created from the standard job’s schedule template are considered. If an appropriate schedule exists, the work order’s tasks are added to the schedule. If an appropriate schedule does not exist, APM creates it and then adds the tasks to the schedule.

Tasks can be scheduled over multiple schedules, depending on the task durations and the schedule duration. For example, if a work order contains three 12-hour tasks, and the schedule duration is 12 hours, the tasks are scheduled on three consecutive schedules.

When multiple future work orders are generated from a standard job, each work order is scheduled on the appropriate schedule. If the work order’s start dates are adjusted as a result of the completion date of an earlier work order, the related schedule entry is moved to the appropriate schedule.

If the job’s maintenance group uses simple scheduling, you do not select a schedule template. The system will use the work order’s planned start date to add the work order tasks to the maintenance group’s schedule.

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Resource Availability

One of the key factors in developing a schedule is matching the work that needs to be done with the employees available to perform the work. Scheduling too much or too little work for a maintenance group can result in ineffective use of your tradespeople. It is also important to match the trades required to perform the work with the trades of the people available. For example, if you do not have any welders available, there is no point in scheduling work that requires the use of a welder.

APM tracks the current availability status of both trades and employees. As you add or remove tasks on a schedule, APM calculates the remaining availability of trades or employees for that schedule. For example, if you add a task that requires a welder for 4 hours, APM reduces the availability of the welder trade by 4 hours.

APM summarizes this availability information on the schedule worksheets.

This feature provides an immediate and accurate picture of how much work can still be added to the schedule.

Setting Up Schedule Availability

There are four different methods for setting up the initial availability on a schedule or a schedule template:

•	Use the availability entered here: You can enter the availability at a trade level directly on the schedule or template. You cannot use this option to enter employee availability. Availability for other resources can also be entered.

•	Calculate the trade availability based on the employees scheduled to work: Employees scheduled to work during the schedule period are included in the availability. APM summarizes these records to calculate the trade availability. Availability for other resources can be entered manually.

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.

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Calculate the trade availability based on the employees assigned to the schedule’s maintenance groups: APM calculates availability based on the maintenance groups selected for the schedule and the employees that are assigned to the maintenance groups. The availability is based on the employees’ primary trade and is tracked by trade, employee, and employee/trade. Availability for other resources can be entered manually.

•	Sum the availability from the schedule’s child schedules: APM calculates the schedule’s availability by totaling the availability from the child schedules. This option is normally used in a schedule hierarchy where the child schedules calculate availability using one of the other options.

Employee Availability

APM can track the availability of each employee assigned to a schedule. In order to track employee availability at the employee level, you need to either:

•	Calculate availability using maintenance group assignments

•	Calculate availability from employee work schedules (imported from your corporate Human Resources or Employee Scheduling system or entered manually)

If employee availability information is available on a schedule, then APM summarizes the employee availability to calculate the schedule’s trade availability.

As you schedule tasks and assign them to the employee, his or her availability is reduced for the schedule. For example, Jane has 35 hours available on a schedule. You schedule a 4-hour task and assign it to Jane. Jane’s employee availability is reduced by 4 hours, leaving 31 hours of availability for the schedule. You can continue to assign additional tasks until Jane’s availability is reduced to 0. At this point, you have scheduled a complete week’s worth of work for Jane.

If you continue to assign work after Jane’s availability reaches 0, APM tracks the number of hours that Jane is “over-scheduled”. For example, if you were to assign 45 hours of work to Jane, she would be 10 hours over-scheduled.

In fact, many schedulers like to over-schedule employees by a few hours each week or day. This way, if a job takes less time than what was estimated or if a scheduled job cannot be performed (such as when the parts required to perform the task are not available), the employee has another task to perform without having to come back to the scheduler or supervisor for more work.

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Viewing Availability Data

APM can track the availability for:

•	A schedule (availability summary)

•	A group of employees working at a trade (trade availability)

•	Job contractors, services, tools, or rental equipment (resource availability)

•	Each employee on the schedule (employee availability)

APM tracks and displays the following availability data on each schedule:

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Employees: The total number of employees who are available to the schedule or to the trade. Use the number of employees as a guideline only, in combination with the hours available for each trade and employee. For example, the schedule might say that you have 2 employees available: Joe and Jane. If Jane is available full-time but Joe is only available half-days, you can only schedule work for 1.5 full-time employees.

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Availability: The number of person-hours, trade-hours, or resource-hours available on the schedule. Depending on which level of data you are reviewing, this is either the total number of hours available for all employees, for the employees of a trade, or for an individual employee. For example, you have 3 employees available to the schedule, two mechanics for 30 hours each (Jane and Jim), and one machinist for 20 hours (Joe). The total availability is 80 hours, the mechanic trade availability is 60 hours, and Joe’s employee availability is 20 hours.

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Scheduled: The number of hours of work that has been added to the schedule, assigned to the trade or resource, or assigned to an employee. APM calculates the trade’s scheduled hours based on the trade requirements planned for the scheduled tasks. APM calculates the employee’s scheduled hours based on the scheduled tasks that are assigned to that employee.

Note: Over-scheduled hours are not included in the Scheduled hours total. For example, if the total availability is 40 hours and 50 hours of work have been scheduled, the totals will be: Scheduled = 40, Over-scheduled = 10.

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Remaining availability: The number of hours that are remaining to be scheduled for the schedule, trade or resource, or the employee. APM calculates remaining availability by subtracting the scheduled hours from the total availability. For example, if the welder trade is scheduled for 6 hours and the total availability of welders is 10 hours, the remaining availability will be 4 hours. Remaining availability is never shown as a negative value. If the scheduled hours exceed the available hours, the remaining availability is set to zero. The difference is shown in the over-scheduled hours.

•	Over-scheduled: The number of hours that are scheduled that exceed the availability.

Percentage Availability During a Shift

You can specify an availability percentage for each maintenance group and employee. APM uses the schedule availability percentage to calculate the number of hours an employee is available for work assignments during a shift.

Note: This value will only apply to schedules where employee availability is being calculated.

For example, a maintenance tradesperson has a schedule availability percentage of 90%. For a twelve-hour shift, the employee’s available time would be calculated as 10.8 hours. A production operator who performs some maintenance work might be given an availability percentage of 25%. In this case, the operator’s availability is calculated as 3 hours for a 12-hour shift.

You can enter an availability percentage on each maintenance group. This tells APM the usual availability percentage for the employees assigned that maintenance group. You can use the employee’s availability percentage when an individual employee’s availability is different from the maintenance group’s usual value.

Tracking Trade Versus Employee Availability

Even when you are using employee availability on most of your schedules, there might be schedules for which you do not want this level of detail. For example, when developing a shutdown schedule that will be performed solely by outside contractors your internal employee availability will not be useful.

You can track availability at the trade level only. You can do this by entering the number of employees and hours available for each trade. You will still be able to assign tasks to employees and track the hours scheduled per employee on each schedule.

If your availability is constant from week to week, you can define the normal trade availability on a schedule template. Each time you create a new schedule from the template, the normal trade availability is copied over. You can adjust the availability to account for changes such as vacations, or extra resources. If you are not using schedule templates, you can enter the trade availability directly on the schedule.

Alternatively, you do not have to add trade or employee availability information to a schedule. APM will still track the number of hours that have been scheduled for each trade, and for each employee.

You can use the hours scheduled information to track the amount of work you have added to the schedule. This can be a useful technique when developing schedules for things like shutdowns or capital projects. If you are bringing in contractors to perform the work, or using overtime labor, you will be able to see how much overtime or contractor time is needed.

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Multi-Trade Employees

In many environments, an employee can perform work in two or more trades. This information is on the APM employee record.

Even in environments with multi-trade employees, (employees who can perform more than one trade), the employee is usually scheduled to work on only their primary trade. The employee can be scheduled to work on the alternate trade when there is a lack of work for their primary trade or when there is an excess of work in another trade.

Sometimes, a task might require two trades to complete it. In this case, you can assign the task to an employee who is competent in both trades. For example, Joe Smith is primarily a mechanic but is also qualified as a welder. You have a task that requires a mechanic for 4 hours and a welder for 1 hour. Rather than schedule two different people, you can assign the task to Mr. Smith.

When calculating trade availability, APM assumes that you are assigning work based on the trade shown on the employee’s work schedule. This is normally the employee’s primary trade. If an employee will be working on an alternate trade, you need to add this information to the work schedule. Then, APM can use the alternate trade when calculating the schedule’s availability. See below for an example:

APM uses the employee’s scheduled trade to show the initial availability to the schedule. However, you can move the availability between the employees’ different trades. In the above example, you could move 8 of Joe’s hours from mechanic to welder or you could move Jane’s 16 welder hours back to the mechanic trade. This allows you to use the available resources in the most efficient way possible.

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Employees Shared Between Maintenance Groups

As with multi-trade employees, you might need to reflect the employee’s availability to each maintenance group. The employee’s work schedule (either imported into APM or entered manually) identifies the maintenance group, hours scheduled, trade and shift for each date that the employee is working. If the employee’s availability is being split between two maintenance groups, you must enter a separate work schedule record for each maintenance group.

For example, if Joe is splitting his time evenly between mechanic crew 500 and welding shop 230, you would enter two work schedule records: 4 hours per day for mechanic crew 500 and 4 hours per day for welding shop 230.

Be sure that the total hours scheduled for the employee do not exceed the hours the employee is working. This will result in your availability being overstated and most likely result in the employee being over-scheduled.

Note: If you are using maintenance group assignments to calculate availability, you cannot show split availability between maintenance groups. This is because an employee can only be assigned to one maintenance group on the employee record.

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Tracking Availability for Job Contractors, Services, Tools, and Equipment

You can use the scheduling function to track availability for resources other than employees, such as contractors, tools, or equipment.

Tip: For equipment such as cranes that require the use of an operator, you can track the equipment’s availability by defining and tracking availability against the operator. This approach might be more intuitive and require less setup than tracking the availability on the equipment itself.

To track availability for non-employee resources, you must manually add availability for each resource on the schedule. For example, for 3 cranes available around the clock on a weekly schedule, you would enter a total Crane availability of 504 hours.

When you schedule a work order task that contains requirements for these resources, these requirements will be added to the schedule, and their availability tracked.

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Non-Catalog Resources

You can add non-catalog resources to schedules (trades, contractors, and time-based services or tools that are not in your resource catalog). However, availability is not tracked for these resources. To track availability, scheduled hours, or over-scheduled status you would need to add the item to your resource catalog.

You can view the hours scheduled for all resources (catalog and non-catalog) on the schedule’s Worksheet view, Requirements tab, Hours scheduled by resource configuration.

Note: If your schedule includes requirements for non-catalog resources (that is, services or tools not listed in your resource catalog), you should ensure that the description for each requirement is unique. This will ensure that the names of the MS Project resources that are created are also unique.

Expiring Schedules

A schedule that has passed its end date can be used as a source of tasks for another schedule and as a source of information for any scheduling compliance and analysis reports that you are running. Other than these uses, old schedules serve no function. You can reopen an expired schedule at any time.

Any work order tasks that were included on the old schedule but were not completed should be returned to the work backlog so that you can re-schedule them.

You can have APM automatically expire your schedules for you. You can also expire a schedule manually. When a schedule is expired, APM:

•	Removes the schedule from your list of open schedules

•	Removes tasks on the schedule that are still open from the list of assigned tasks for an employee

•	If indicated on the schedule, any of the schedule’s tasks that are not completed are returned to the work backlog

Note: If you return scheduled work to the backlog when the schedule is expired and you then re-schedule the work, the system does not add the trade requirements back to the new schedule. It is assumed that some of the work has been completed and, therefore, you must add new trade requirements for the remaining work.

Expired schedules are not deleted automatically unless that option is selected in the schedule’s properties. In order for schedules to be automatically expired, the Expire Schedules action must be run for the site. You can run this action from the site’s Tools menu, Work Management option, or your system administrator can schedule this action to run on a regular basis.

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Locking Schedules

After you have finished adding tasks to a schedule, you can lock it. This allows you to monitor the amount of work that has been added to the schedule afterwards.

For example, you might start setting up the next week’s schedule on the preceding Thursday. By Friday afternoon, you have completed the schedule and the affected production and maintenance departments have agreed to it. As employees work with the schedule through the week, not all of the scheduled tasks may be completed because they may be preempted by more urgent tasks.

If you have locked the schedule, you can track the number of these urgent tasks. After the schedule is locked, any tasks that are later added to the schedule are flagged. You can use this flag if you create printed reports for your schedules.

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Exporting Schedules to Microsoft Project

After you have defined schedules in APM, you can export the contents to Microsoft® Project (MS Project). Exporting a schedule to MS Project allows you to use advanced scheduling functions, such as task dependencies and resource leveling, and to view the schedule in various ways, such as a Gantt or Pert chart. For example, you might want to use MS Project’s leveling feature to fine-tune a complex shutdown schedule.

Note: Exporting schedules will only work with the latest supported version of MS Project.

You can also export a set of schedules and sub-schedules to an MS Project file. This allows you to work with multiple schedules in one file, to work with master and sub-projects, or for two schedulers to combine their schedules in one project.

APM creates a link between your APM schedule and the MS Project file. While the schedule is linked, you cannot make changes to it in APM, with the exception of adding tasks. This ensures that no conflicting changes are made to your schedule.

The schedule information can be modified in MS Project, and the updated information can then be imported back into your APM schedule.

However, some changes are visible only in the MS Project file. If you add new tasks or split tasks in MS Project, they will not appear in the schedule when you import it back into APM. You should add or split the tasks in APM and then re-export the schedule to MS Project.

For this reason, you can use MS Project to fine-tune your schedules, but you should use APM to manage work orders and tasks, enter time cards, and so on. As work is completed on a schedule, you can update the completion status of the work order tasks in MS Project.

For more information on working with schedules and MS Project files, please see Exporting Schedules to Microsoft Project.

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