Archibus SaaS / Maintenance / Corrective Maintenance / Labor Scheduler
Maintenance / Corrective Maintenance
/ Supervisor / Labor Scheduler
Maintenance / Preventive Maintenance / Supervisor / Labor Scheduler
Unscheduled Work (Concept)
Supervisors may want to provide flexibility in the execution on maintenance tasks by assigning work to craftspersons, but not scheduling the execution on the work. Instead, the craftsperson will examine the list of assigned but unscheduled tasks and execute the tasks as they make sense. For example, a supervisor might explicitly schedule tasks that must be immediately executed in order to ensure safety or operation of the facility; these tasks must be done on time and the supervisor needs to know if they fall behind. Other tasks -- such as painting a door frame, transplanting a shrub, or grouting restroom tile -- take lower priority and can be executed when the craftsperson has availability. The supervisor might want to assign these types of tasks to a craftsperson, but not schedule them for a specific date and time. After craftspersons complete their scheduled tasks, they can work on these unscheduled tasks.
In general terms, PM work is typically of a lower priority than urgent Corrective Maintenance work. Although some PM work is critical for life-safety equipment or to maintain compliance with government regulations and cannot be delayed, a lot of PM work can be considered as routine and can be delayed to some degree. Accordingly, a supervisor may want to schedule on demand work, but leave some preventive maintenance work as assigned but unscheduled. Practices at your site will determine which work you choose to schedule, and which you assign to craftspersons but leave as unscheduled so that the craftsperson can determine when to work on it. In general terms, the prescribed workflow is to schedule important or time-consuming jobs on the calendar, and add less important, routine, or short jobs to the unscheduled task list.
When working with the Labor Scheduler, the supervisor can take advantage of several features that support assigning and not scheduling work, but still accounting for these assignments when managing craftsperson workloads.
Generating Unscheduled Work
There are a few ways to generate unscheduled work (that is assign work to a craftsperson but not schedule the work):
- From the Labor Scheduler, use the Assign button to assign one or multiple work requests to a craftsperson. With the Assign button, you do not schedule the work. See Assign One or Multiple Work Requests to a Craftsperson as Unscheduled Work.
-
A craftsperson self-assigns a work request.
- Using the Maintenance Console or Maintenance mobile app, a supervisor or craftsperson assigns a craftsperson to an Issued work request.
Viewing Unscheduled Work on the Labor Scheduler
The Labor Scheduler presents unscheduled work in two areas:
Individual Craftsperson view
When set to show an individual craftsperson, the Labor Scheduler displays the Unscheduled Work pane to the right of the calendar. It lists all of the unscheduled tasks assigned to the craftsperson. You can drag tasks from this pane to the calendar to schedule them if you wish. See Scheduling Unscheduled Work and Missed Work. 
Multiple Craftsperson Weekly Schedule
When set to show multiple craftsperson weekly tasks, the Labor Scheduler includes the Unscheduled Tasks row summarizing the unscheduled work for each craftsperson. The Labor Scheduler view calculates the estimated Unscheduled Hours that a craftsperson is committed to for the week.
The Unscheduled Tasks row is composed of blocks representing segments of time. The color of the segments provide the supervisor with a quick visual indicator of each craftsperson's general availability for additional tasks. A block that is completely white represents a time frame that has none of the available time being occupied by unscheduled tasks. A block that is completely blue represents a time frame that has 100% of the available time being occupied by unscheduled tasks. If a craftsperson has 50 percent of available time for unscheduled tasks, the color will be 50% blue.
A segment represents all of the available time in the periods between the days when Unscheduled tasks are due. Each individual day within the segment may have different amounts of availability, depending on the craftsperson's working hours and any scheduled tasks, but the color of the Unscheduled Tasks bar will be the same for all the days in the segment.
For example, suppose that there is PM job that is due on May 15, and today is May 1. The supervisor wants to assign the job to WILL TRAM, but not schedule it for any particular day. The supervisor can look at Will's schedule and see all the scheduled tasks, along with the colors of the unscheduled task bar segments between now and May 15. If the unscheduled task bar colors are not all completely blue, then Will has some available time in which to perform the PM job.
As another example, suppose a supervisor wants to assign a scheduled job to Will for a particular day, such as May 10. The Labor Scheduler shows that Will has no scheduled tasks for May 10, but that day is included in Unscheduled Task bar that is colored dark blue. This tells the supervisor that, although there are no tasks scheduled for May 10, Will's time is already accounted for by some unscheduled work
Craftsperson Remaining Hours Calculation
The Remaining Hours calculation, displayed for each craftsperson to the right of the Unscheduled Tasks bar, provides the supervisor a sense of the craftsperson's total time, while still allowing craftspersons to control some parts of their own schedule.
"Available Time" refers to the time that craftsperson is working but not scheduled for a specific work request. A craftsperson who is working 40 hours in a week, with 10 hours of scheduled work, and 30 hours worth of unscheduled work that is due by the end of the week is considered to have no available time.
Unscheduled tasks contribute to the craftsperson availability calculation and are reflected on the Unscheduled Tasks bar if:
- the unscheduled task contain a Due Date (
wr.date_escalation_completion) - the unscheduled task contain Estimated Hours (
wrcf.hours_est) - the craftsperson's regular working hours are be defined in the Craftsperson Schedule table (
cf_schedules) - exceptions to that schedule are defined in Craftsperson Schedules Variances table (
cf_schedules_variances).
Work Requests Assignments that do not contain a Due Date and Estimated Hours are excluded from calculation and are not included in the Unscheduled Tasks bar. If a craftsperson's regular hours are not defined for the selected time period, then the Unscheduled Task bar still displays the blocks and estimated hours of Unscheduled Tasks, but does not include color shading of that time.
The calculation presumes that unscheduled work assignments will be worked on in an evenly distributed fashion. Although some organizations or workers may tend to procrastinate and only perform unscheduled work close to the due date, the purpose of the calculation is to give supervisors a sense of how much of a craftsperson's time is available vs how much is committed to scheduled and unscheduled work.
It is important to not think that unscheduled work will only begin when all the other unscheduled work with an earlier due date is already done. For example, if a craftsperson has 2 hours of unscheduled work that is due in 4 days, and has 20 hours of unscheduled work that is due in 5 days, that craftsperson will need to begin working on the 20 hours of work before the 2 hours is due. The system makes no assumptions as to which work will be done first; it only knows when work cannot be worked on any longer, based on the due dates.
To perform the calculation, the view breaks up a craftsperson's calendar into segments, according to the due dates of the unscheduled work. Unscheduled work can be done in any of the available time between now and the job's due date. For example, if the current day is Monday and a craftsperson has 5 hours of unscheduled work due on Wednesday, and another 6 hours of unscheduled work due on Friday, then the current week contains these segments:
- Monday-Wednesday -- The craftsperson has time from Monday-Wednesday to perform the work that is due on Wednesday,
- Monday-Friday -- The craftsperson has time from Monday-Friday to perform the work that is due on Friday
Note that the Labor Scheduler would show these segments as adjacent time blocks; in this case a time block from Monday-Wednesday and another from Thursday-Friday.
For each segment of time, the system considers the following factors:
- Craftsperson's Standard hours
- Craftsperson's Schedule Variances
- Estimated Hours of Scheduled Work during Standard Hours
- Estimated Hours of Unscheduled Work
Example
Craftsperson WILL TRAM works Monday-Friday from 9-5. There are 10 hours of unscheduled tasks that are all due by Friday. There are 18 hours of scheduled tasks during this time.
- Total regular hours = 40
- Total Scheduled hours = 18
- Remaining Available Hours = 22
- Total Unscheduled hours = 10
- Percentage of available hours devoted to unscheduled work: 10/22 = 45.5%.
With this information, the Labor Scheduler displays a row for WILL TRAM for this week. The Unscheduled Tasks bar for WILL TRAM displays a bar from Monday to Friday, with the number 10 to represent 10 hours of unscheduled work that is due on Friday. This bar would be colored about halfway between white an blue to represent the 45.5% of available time that can be considered "taken" with unscheduled work.
Back To