Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling

Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling is scheduling an organization's Work Tasks while taking into consideration the importance of work, the availability of the resources as well as possible constraints. The scheduling process is carried out in the IFS Advanced Optimization & Scheduling engine. Material, tool availability, and additional qualifications may be used as constraints in the scheduling process. Scheduling is based on the value of the work.

The scheduling process considers the constraints placed by Work Orders, Resources and Part stocks that are actually loaded into a particular dataset and not all the Work Orders, Resources and Part stocks available in the organization.

Dynamic Work Scheduling Dataset

A work scheduling dataset is the entity on which planning needs to be carried out. It can be a single site or a collection of sites. Multiple datasets can be created to plan different sites of an organization. However, it is important to note that different datasets are entirely independent of each other and know nothing about the existence or planning of other datasets. If a dataset is created per single site, it is important to make sure resources and parts stocks used by that site are not used by other sites that are loaded into other datasets. It is expected that the same data, resource or part stocks are not sent to multiple datasets.

Scheduling Concept

A Work Task is the smallest schedulable entity. The scheduling engine essentially focus on allocating resources to do the work, taking other constraints into consideration. A single resource requirement for the task is called an activity in scheduling. If a work task requires multiple resources, that means the task has multiple activities and these multiple activities should work together to complete the work task. For example, if a task requires three resources, this is handled as three activities that should be planned in the same time slot.

The minimum requirements for a Work Task to be considered for planning using Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling solution are as follows:

Work Task should have a duration
Work Task should require at least 1 resource (at least one activity). Resources can be of person or tool type.
Work Task Should have an early start date
Early start date should not be later than the scheduling horizon of the work scheduling dataset.

The goal of the scheduling process is to achieve the highest value in the overall scheduling solution. This means work tasks that have higher values gets prioritized over those having lower values.

A successful scheduling process will result in the following:

The planned start and end dates are set on work tasks and work orders that were successfully scheduled.
If the resource demand in the work task is for resources planned on individual level, then the resources are assigned to the work task.

Setting Value for Work Tasks

Value can be assigned to work tasks based on Work Type, Equipment Criticality and Task Priority. This setup is done at the Dynamic Work Scheduling Dataset level. The goal of the whole scheduling solution is to achieve maximum value. This means tasks with higher values, defined by the value configuration, gets prioritized higher in the scheduling process.

Resources

Resources can be planned on resource group level or individual level.

For group level planning, capacity should be defined for the site from which resources are used by work tasks (Maintenance Organization Site). Resource shifts are based on the calendar connected to the resource group.
For resources planned on individual level, the HR Schedule can be used. In case HR Schedule is not used for a resource, the schedule is derived using the calendar connected to the resource group.
If a resource group is maintenance organization independent, all the connected individual resources are treated as organizational independent. These resources are planned across the site ignoring the maintenance organization of work tasks.
The resource group is treated as a skill of the resources connected to the group. In case a resource is connected to a lower node in a resource hierarchy, all the nodes (resource groups) in the structure above the resource are considered as skills for that resource.
Cost defined for resources or resource groups has no impact on scheduling process.
If an individual resource is defined in the task in addition to the resource group, this individual resource is considered a fixed requirement for the task. The work task is planned only if this fixed resource can be assigned to the task considering all other constraints and task values.

Other Scheduling Constraints

While Work Tasks and Resources are the two main entities required for Scheduling, there are other entities that can be used as constraints. It is possible to switch there constraints on/off at the dataset level.

Materials

Whether to use material as a constraint can be set in the dataset. Material stocks include:

Quantity available in the inventory
Orders placed, not delivered yet.
Any quantity required of a part is considered available after the "current date" + "lead time" defined for the part.

NOTE: Parts are not reserved as a part of the scheduling process. Material orders are also not created by scheduling process. MRP/PMRP processes handle the part supply function.

Additional Qualifications

Additional qualifications include competencies and certificates. These constraints can also be enabled or disabled at the dataset level. When enabled, Additional Qualifications are treated as a skill connected to the resources.

Early start and late finish date

The Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling solution tries to plan tasks within the early start and late finish period. However, if this is not possible due to constraints, task may be planned after the late finish date.

Continuous Planning and Change Detection

The Dynamic scheduling process runs continuously in the scheduling server. Changes to the tasks, such as creating new tasks and changing the resource demand(s) of tasks can be detected and sent to the scheduling process that runs in the server. For this, relevant database triggers should be activated. The scheduling server will send a new update to the business application regularly and these updates may also change the planning of currently planned tasks. This may be due to the scheduling server finding new optimum solutions during the dynamic scheduling process as well as due to changes in work tasks that were sent to the server automatically by enabling triggers.

Results from Scheduling Process

Successfully scheduled work tasks will have the planned start and end dates set. In addition, if the resources are planned on individual level, assignments are also created for successfully scheduled work tasks.

Work Tasks not Planned during the Scheduling Process

There can be multiple reasons for work tasks to remain unplanned after the scheduling process including the following:

Materials are not available during the timeframe for which the Scheduling Dataset is valid.
Skills such as additional qualifications required to perform the task are not available during the dataset valid period.
Resource capacity is insufficient to plan all the tasks during the dataset valid period so that tasks with lower value remain unplanned.
When there are dependent tasks and one or many of the tasks cannot be planned, all the tasks in the dependency chain will remains unplanned.
If a task has a fixed start date, if resources cannot be allocated to that task at the fixed start date due to constraints, the task may remain unplanned.
If a task has a fixed resource and that resource cannot be allocated based on constraints, the task will remain unplanned.

Work Tasks Planned Later than the Latest Finish Date

The scheduling process tries to plan all tasks between the early start and late finish dates specified in the task. However, there can be situations where the overall scheduling process cannot plan all the tasks within early the start and late finish dates. In such a situation, the scheduling process may plan some of the tasks later than late finish date.

Handling Exceptions

There can be different actions needed if the result of the planning process is different from expected results including the following:

If there seems to be a problem in the way high priority tasks are getting scheduled, re-visit the value setting configuration for the dataset.
If there are limitations in the resource capacity and skills required to get all the work planned within the dataset duration, revisit the resource setup.
If there are problems in material availability during the dataset duration. For example if some parts have longer lead times than the valid dataset duration, the scheduling process cannot plan tasks that require these materials.

Manually Adjusting the Plan

Adjustments to the output from the scheduling process can be done in the IFS business system. However, it is important to note that the dynamic scheduling process sends updates to the IFS business system continuously. New optimizations to the plan or changes in Work Tasks may override manual changes.

Setting the manual adjustments to not be overridden can be done as follows:

If a change is done to task planned start and end dates, those changes should be set as fixed dates.
If a resource must be set as a fixed resource, the relevant Resource ID must be set along with the Resource Group in the Work Task resource row (Work Task/Resources).

Access Requirements for Different Users

If the Additional Qualifications constraint enabled for the Dynamic Work Scheduling Dataset, additional qualifications of resources included in the dataset must be sent to the scheduling engine. For this, the planner running the Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling process must have access to the qualifications related data in Human Capitol Management for relevant resources.
User that runs the Dynamic Work Planning and Scheduling process must have access to the Sites defined in the Dataset.
Scheduling user that has been setup to writes back to IFS business system must have access to the Sites defined in the Dataset.