Everything should be connected

Some say you should determine scheduling requirements first before buying scheduling software. I would agree. But what if you aren't really sure what the ideal design should be? The first step is to begin researching and also recognize … "You don't know what you don't know".

The business of scheduling can become difficult to explain because there are different types of scheduling, schedules and roles. The different types of schedules include daily/weekly, outage-turnaround, and project schedules.

Here are some additional tips: 

1. The ideal scheduling software product should handle all of the above scenarios. But if this single product solution is not found, then you must prioritize requirements and choose must haves. It's also possible that you may end up with two scheduling systems.
2. Some say....the Daily Plan and Weekly Schedule, should come straight from the CMMS as base product.
3. It is a best practice to utilize a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for large project schedules. The WBS with cost accounts would be able to generate a Project Cost Tracking report - direct from the CMMS (e.g. AFE Report for refinery modifications). The WBS design is also ideal for tracking scope and cost changes.
4. Manual resource leveling is great and looks impressive on a graphical display. But large schedules should not be manually resource leveled. Therein automatic resource leveling as a feature is strongly recommended. Plus, there should be options to control the processing order whereby the leveling starts with TOTAL FLOAT (TF) and followed by PRIORITY DESCENDING….or any fields the user wants to specify.
5. Other cutting edge features might be defined as (a) close integration with the CMMS but still have full-function scheduling, (b) critical path walker, and (c) the ability to share information with an email calendar (i.e. M/S Outlook).
6. Schedule activities can and should be assigned to Shift-Calendars, such as Dayshift or 24-7.
7. Progress reporting is serious business. In a perfect world all scheduled work is completed within the scheduled week. But this is not a perfect world. There is carry-over work which has a remaining estimate different from the baseline estimate. Resource leveling should use the remaining estimate. And carry-over work should be given high priority on next weeks schedule. An advanced user must also understand significance of a Data Date. An outage schedule for example gets daily progress updates. And a given activity that is in progress can be reported on several ways [see below figure]
   

*** The above functionality is absolutely essential if you plan to have accurate updates and schedule forecasts.

Below is a picture of the CRITICAL PATH WALKER.

This was extremely useful to the Nuclear Plant Operations Shift Supervisor who was responsible for the final Outage Schedule overall duration and critical path. He had to somehow decipher a 1500 activity PERT chart with 2500 logic ties and figure out why a particular milestone was "so far out". This Cobol program quickly gave him that answer as he simply had to hit the PF keys to walk the critical path - backwards.

There is a US Patent (7,421,372) which describes an "order of fire" design which combines multiple Selects with individual Sorts to perform a combined resource leveled result. The Order of Fire concept is a design missing from every scheduling tool on the market [If you know otherwise please correct me]. In the world of maintenance, different "sets of work" need to be considered because they each have different sort criteria. The trick is to tell the resource leveling program which records to evaluate first - with the SORT variables. There could be a SORT-1 and a SORT-2 field, etc. Thus there needs to be a marching order.

Below is an illustration of the ORDER OF FIRE function.

IN SUMMATION

Scheduling is a best practice and can enhance work force productivity and coordination -- provided it is followed. And the software you choose can make a big difference. But whatever software you have, if the output is only a “list of work”, then minimal value is provided to the organization. And lastly, you may have 100% compliance on your PM schedule but be doing the wrong work.