Shifts and capacity patterns

A shift is the amount of time a maintenance staff member spends at work. Each shift has a start time, a total duration, and a number of hours of work produced by each person working that shift. Shifts are used when you create capacity patterns.

A capacity pattern is a pattern of time periods and labor skills. Capacity patterns are used to model the nominal capacity available at your maintenance location(s) well in advance of a project, when the real shift schedule that identifies the individuals who will be scheduled to work is not yet known. Therefore, a capacity pattern captures the types of work and amount of work that can be performed during a certain time period, without naming the actual people who will do the work.

A capacity pattern is either a one-day or a seven-day pattern of shifts. For each shift in a pattern, you record the types of work and the number of resources that are planned to be available. Capacity patterns are used by the Production Planning and Control (PP&C) application and the Long Range Planner (LRP) application.