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Maybe I've asked this before, years ago. . .I don't know. But the Calendars app in Maximo. . .maybe I just don't quite "get it."
Scenario: We're a higher-ed institution. Yes we have a full-time Maintenance staff that has a regular set of hours, but we also have A LOT of undergrad and graduate students who work part-time on-campus jobs to help pay their way through school.
Here's a specific example of one person's schedule that I'd like to get into a Calendar:
Mon 8/13: Working for Maintenance 7:30 am - 11:30 am. Then a paid meeting (from another department) after lunch for 30 minutes; then working for a 3rd department for another 3.5 hours after that! If I can only get the Maintenance hours, I'd be okay with that; if all the hours with departments noted, even better.)
Tues. 8/14: Maintenance 7:30 - 11:45 (so 15 more minutes than yesterday). Same 3.5 hours in that other department in the afternoon. Then a paid meeting in the evening.
Wed. 8/15 - Fri 8/17: all three days 7:30 am - 12 am at Maintenance, same 3.5 hours in the afternoon at that other department.
Mon 8/20 - Wed. 8/22: all three days 7:30 - 1:45 at Maintenance (with a 45-minute lunch break in there somewhere), then 2.5 hours at that other department in the afternoon.
Thur. 8/23: 7:30 - 10:30 at Maintenance, then same 2.5 hours in afternoon at that other department.
Fri. 8/24: Only the 2.5 hours in the afternoon at that other department.
Sat. 8/25: 4 hours in the morning, then 4 hours in the evening (4 hour gap in-between) at yet a 4th department.
Mon. 8/27: 4.5 hours in the morning at that 4th department, then 1:15 - 4:15 pm at Maintenance.
--Then the semester starts, and it gets a bit more routine. This grad student then only works at Maintenance (not shared with other departments anymore) as follows:
Mon/Wed/Fri 7:30 am - 4:15 pm with a 45-minute lunch break. Basically what our full-time people do, except full-timers do that every weekday.
Tuesdays: 10 am - 2:45 pm with a 45-minute lunch break.
---I can get all these into the Calendar. I mean, the way I'd do it is create this Person a unique Calendar, and create and apply pretty particular Shifts that would only be shareable by a few people, if they happen to work the same Shift. I got all that working, no problem.
Where it goes wonky is if I wanted to use Assignment Manager. It looks like you have to have a Primary Shift defined for that to be able to work. And then if you've added a Work Period that isn't the same Primary Shift ID, Assignment Manager can't see it?
Not having much success when it comes to the Assignment Manager side of it yet/haven't figured it out. I even made a calendar for a guy with a generic 8 hour work day, then went to his Person record and did a Modify Person's Availability to change it from an 8 hour day to a 3 hour day, then tried to use Assignment Manager to create an assignment for him and it showed 11 hours available?!? (I'm guessing it is because in the Mod Avail. I chose a WORK reason; still need to experiment more.)
Anyways, I'm not finding any good YouTube videos on this, and the canned Help is pretty generic. Anyone here happen to use Maximo Calendars extensively, preferably outside of a 1st-2nd-3rd shift setting like manufacturing, willing to give some pointers?
Travis Herron
Glad to see someone posting in here. Calendars have always been a problem , sorry cant help.
Well, at least I'm not alone in that opinion!
Best that I can figure out is: Working with one-to-many relationships is harder than dealing with one-to-one relationships, so they made this thing of 'Primary Shift' and based most everything off that. We'll give one Person one Primary Calendar and one Primary Shift, and we'll work on labor assignments for Assignment Manager from that.
That doesn't work in my world.
Been reading up on it, and it looks like you are supposed to give a generic shift -- something like DAY -- and set its pattern (e.g., 7 days in pattern, pattern starts on Sunday, working hours from 8 am to 4 pm on days 2 thru 6). Then you apply that shift to their calendar for a specified date range (for us, that's usually going to be a 3-month range if this is a grad or undergrad student; 1 year if it is full-time staff). THEN you go to that person's Person record and Modify Availability.
That would take forever!!! Over 100 people, adjusting different ways. Just to adjust one person's schedule from that generic DAY shift that I gave as the example. . .I'd have to adjust every single day because I'm OCD and would want to put their scheduled lunch time in there too. So each day gets TWO adjustment entries per person. . .That would take FOREVER.
So I think the best I can do is:
1). Make the Calendars how I want to, with each Person having their own unique Calendar with whatever weird shifts they end up working. That way I can use the Apply Shifts to Date Range button to pass that down across several months at a time.
2). Link the Calendar to the Person record. Make the Person's Primary Shift that wonky DAY shift, which isn't actually on their Calendar at all, so no hours would show up in Assignment Manager, so. . .
3). Export the Work Periods data to Excel.
4). Use an Object Structure to import that data to PERSON and MODAVAIL tables. Depending on what info I want in MODAVAIL that table may need to be tweaked. . .add a field and such.
5). If there are subsequent adjustments, they'll have to be made in both the Person's Calendar and in their Availability. Still better than manually adjusting EVERYTHING for EVERYBODY.
Or IBM could just fix it so it reads their availability based off of what's in their Work Periods, instead of what's in their Work Periods "as long as it involves their Primary Shift and then if not secondarily check the MODAVAIL table." I don't even understand why MODAVAIL had to be invented, apart from the weirdness that they did for implementing Calendars for people. Further, suppose I wanted to make a custom Calendar to show when a particular classroom is in use, should it be needed for some reason. There doesn't seem to be a MODAVAIL for that; any changes would have to be done to the Work Periods.
Travis Herron
While I understand the challenges you're facing in trying to make the software wrap itself around such a complex schedule, I can't help but asking why such a schedule is required in the first place? Was someone trying to challenge you?
As I said, these are undergrad or graduate students. During the semesters, they have classes that they take, and we build a work schedule around that. For my department in particular it can become challenging because most sub-departments within "Maintenance" work between 7:30 AM to 4:15 PM; a couple sub-areas might start earlier (7 AM) or end later (5:15 PM). So it's not a simple case of "they can go to class and study during the day and work at night." There are no night work hours available.
For that case-in-point I cited, right now we're in a weird transition period between "summer mode" and "semester mode." There are a lot of areas that just need temporary workers. Like we have a bunch of people help out with various tasks on the weekend when students would arrive. We have tasks to do in preparation for that. Then there are different tasks that are done for the couple of days between when students arrive and when classes start. And there are yet other tasks that we just need people to cover until the undergrad student workers arrive and start work. And sometimes there's just "hey this person needs a few more work hours to fill their week, let's give him to Maintenance."
So I understand what Maximo was trying to do to make it easy to have shared Calendars, but we actually can't "do" easy. They've made some design decisions within their Person management that don't work for us. They assumed Calendars would be and should be easy. They assumed each worker would have a Primary Shift. They assumed each Person has one Supervisor (going back to this case in point, that person had three supervisors in a three-week period, plus a paid meeting from a 4th department so you could argue 4 supervisors).
So no, they weren't trying to challenge me at all. Those kinds of schedules are pretty normal at this time of year. Once our student workers come back, it gets less complex; but even then, within just our Maintenance dept. we'll have a student that is shared between two sub-departments, so two different supervisors. So for us, "Supervisor" is not a one-to-one relationship between boss and employee, it's a many-to-many relationship with Work Periods being the hash table in between.
Hi Travis,
Does the pattern repeat? Is it just a weekly pattern? Or does it change by week. Obviously from what you said it changes when the semester starts...
R/
Will
On Aug 17, 2018, at 8:08 AM, therron@pcci.edu<mailto:therron@pcci.edu> [MAXIMO] <MAXIMO@yahoogroups.com<mailto:MAXIMO@yahoogroups.com>> wrote:
As I said, these are undergrad or graduate students. During the semesters, they have classes that they take, and we build a work schedule around that. For my department in particular it can become challenging because most sub-departments within "Maintenance" work between 7:30 AM to 4:15 PM; a couple sub-areas might start earlier (7 AM) or end later (5:15 PM). So it's not a simple case of "they can go to class and study during the day and work at night." There are no night work hours available.
For that case-in-point I cited, right now we're in a weird transition period between "summer mode" and "semester mode." There are a lot of areas that just need temporary workers. Like we have a bunch of people help out with various tasks on the weekend when students would arrive. We have tasks to do in preparation for that. Then there are different tasks that are done for the couple of days between when students arrive and when classes start. And there are yet other tasks that we just need people to cover until the undergrad student workers arrive and start work. And sometimes there's just "hey this person needs a few more work hours to fill their week, let's give him to Maintenance."
So I understand what Maximo was trying to do to make it easy to have shared Calendars, but we actually can't "do" easy. They've made some design decisions within their Person management that don't work for us. They assumed Calendars would be and should be easy. They assumed each worker would have a Primary Shift. They assumed each Person has one Supervisor (going back to this case in point, that person had three supervisors in a three-week period, plus a paid meeting from a 4th department so you could argue 4 supervisors).
So no, they weren't trying to challenge me at all. Those kinds of schedules are pretty normal at this time of year. Once our student workers come back, it gets less complex; but even then, within just our Maintenance dept. we'll have a student that is shared between two sub-departments, so two different supervisors. So for us, "Supervisor" is not a one-to-one relationship between boss and employee, it's a many-to-many relationship with Work Periods being the hash table in between.
Once the semester starts, it repeats. But for the few weeks either right before or right after a semester, no repetition, just weird one-off schedules.
And then there are (likely) no two people that work the same schedules.
Looking at just our department's grad student work schedules for the semester, some examples:
alphabetically-first worker:
MTWR (R for Thursday) 7:30 - 12:15 (he's the only person that works that schedule);
and Monday 1 PM to 3 PM (one other worker has that schedule)
alphabetically-second worker:
MTWF 7:30 - 12:15; (unique to her);
MWF 1 pm - 4:15; (unique to her, but there is another guy who has that but not on Friday);
and T 1 pm - 2:45 (unique to her).
next:
MWF 9:30 - 11:15 (unique to him);
T 7 - 11:15 (unique to him);
R 7 - 9:45 (unique to him);
and another W shift 12:15 - 4:00 (unique to him).
I could go on. . .
Right now I've got a library full of about 1800 (not a typo) different shift possibilities, and I'm still building more. Yes, they are all in Maximo, and almost all of them have a 7-day repeating pattern (there have been a couple of occasions of 'we need this guy to work this special thing every-other-Saturday and so to adjust the hours we'll leave early on Tuesday' -- so a 14 day pattern). I can make it work for our needs. (I also added other columns to the WORKPERIOD table to be able to accommodate who is the Supervisor FOR THAT SHIFT and which sub-department they'll be working for FOR THAT SHIFT. I think it'll work great; except that I'll have to do the extra work to import that to MODAVAIL if & when we ever use Assignment Manager and/or Scheduler.
So, let's ask this: If I bothered to put in an RFE, and put all this stuff in it that I've detailed in these few posts as justification, how many upvotes would I get?
Travis Herron