Operational Plans

Operational plan represents the productive work plan for an equipment object structure. It mainly consists of a time schedule of operations that are planned called operational plan items. Operational plan items can be defined manually or can be imported from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Those operational plan items are called manual plan items.

Operational Plans are used to schedule work orders, work tasks and PM actions using Planning & Scheduling Optimization (PSO) or Maintenance Planning Board (MPB) schedule engines. The schedule engines will schedule "obstructive" work orders, work tasks and PM actions outside of operational activities where the object is out of operation.

For MPB solution, project activities can also act as operational plan items as it also represent productive work. Therefore it is possible to include project activities also into operational plan and those are called reference plan items.

Operational Plan Items

Manual operational plan item represents operational activity for an object structure. It indicates the operation planned start time and planned finish time and also indicate whether that time period can be considered as available for maintenance work or not. If it is defined as a maintenance window during the indicated time slot any type of maintenance work can be scheduled and performed. An Operational plan item can also have a connection to an Operational Mode. This indicate that any equipment object in the connected object structure that has the same Operational Mode is in the operational critical path meaning that the object is in operation (or in other words being used to perform the operational plan item indicated productive work) when the operational plan item is executed. Using combination of operational plan item information, its operational mode and equipment object operational mode, the PSO or MPB schedule engine decide when the object is available for maintenance. The object accessibility is a necessary requirement for PSO and MPB to schedule obstructive maintenance work.

For MPB solution reference operational plan items is used to represent collection of activities from a project. User can use wild card characters to indicate multiple project activities. When MPB is started, it indicate each reference operational activity. But unlike manual operational plan items, the reference operational plans can not be connected to operational modes and can not be defined as maintenance window within IFS Aurena client. Therefore MPB does not decide object accessibility based on reference operational plan items. This is by the way possible inside MPB when its used in simulation mode.