Maintenance scheduling, an often complex and time-intensive process, must be performed effectively and efficiently in order to avoid unplanned shutdowns, loss of productivity, poor resource utilization, and a blown budget. Optimizing your maintenance planning and scheduling activities will improve overall plant productivity, asset utilization, uptime, and maintenance effectiveness.

WorkAlign Scheduler meets the universal scheduling needs of maintenance organizations. It provides a level of simplicity to the planning and scheduling of maintenance activities via an intuitive user interface, while processing live data through your existing IBM Maximo database.

WorkAlign Scheduler is a completely web-based application that automates the everyday business processes involved in selecting and assigning work orders and associated resources. Sequential, process-oriented, easy-to-use modules guide the user through the entire scheduling process, from work order planning, selection, scheduling, to work completion. It combines work order quality assessments with sophisticated scheduling functionality so you can organize, prioritize, and assign work that can then be executed in a timely and efficient manner.

WorkAlign Scheduler accesses your Maximo work order backlog and uses powerful filters to allow the users to:

• Quickly and efficiently sort and select the work to be scheduled
• Easily schedule work orders at any level in the work order hierarchy
• Rapidly schedule work orders to any day, shift, crew, and/or resource type
• Seamlessly move work orders from one schedule to the next, or from the backlog into the current weekly or daily schedules
• Readily access pre-built, real-time KPIs representing best-in-class maintenance metrics and compliance reporting

WorkAlign Scheduler simplifies the complex role of scheduling into three easy steps:

• Filter and select the records you wish to schedule
• Modify data elements by adding, editing or deleting directly to Maximo, individually or en masse
• Post the completed schedule to Maximo

The major modules and features of WorkAlign Scheduler include:

Work Order Quality Check Module

The WO Quality Check module provides planners and schedulers with a means to test the integrity of the work order backlog. Planned work orders that do not meet a minimum standard of completeness can be filtered from the scheduling process, thus improving overall work order execution and performance.

Scheduling Module

Using more than 30 powerful filters and tools, the backlog of “ready” work orders can be quickly sorted into meaningful subsets. Scheduling can be performed at the header, operation, or resource levels. Scheduling to a date, shift, and/or crew is performed in a staged environment, allowing the user to evaluate the impact of their scheduling decisions using real-time, user-configurable KPIs. Visual options include Gantt views, spreadsheet views, and grid views.

Supervisory Modules

The Supervisor module presents a daily work schedule, which provides the ability to allocate work to specific resources/people, balance resource loading, and break priority work into the current schedule.

PM Forecasting

The PM Forecasting function allows users to lay out anticipated work orders (not yet created) into the future, so that anticipated PM load requirements are taken into account before scheduling non-PM work orders into the future. The PM forecasted work order start dates are based on historical meter reading, completion dates, etc.

Additional Key Features

• Material Availability Check for both stock and direct items

• Work Order Splits for work that is to be repeated routinely over a period of time

• Three-Click Scheduling of “ready” work from a single screen

• KPI Control Center that uses transactional snapshots to generate more than 25 out-of-the-box KPIs, which facilitate planning, scheduling, and compliance tracking

• Work order audit trail tracking

• Creating and editing dependencies across work orders

Check out our IBM Maximo Scheduler resources that include:

IBM Maximo Scheduler data sheet

IBM Maximo Scheduler solution brief

Planning & Scheduling Best Practices white paper

Asset Criticality – not just a Reliability Tool webcast

For other best practices webcasts and white papers, check out our Resources library.