Operational planning software

In addition to the sometimes stressful day-to-day operations, operation planners should always keep track of past, current, and future orders. Why? Past operations may result in unplanned follow-up operations that affect the current week's planning, for example, and require rescheduling. The situation is similar with current operations, which can take unpredictably longer, for example.

When considering future orders and operations, only a small portion of them can be roughly scheduled in advance based on existing maintenance and repair contracts. Below is an overview of the possible scenarios leading to the initiation of an Operation:

• Call from a (new) customer for troubleshooting or scheduled maintenance
• Maintenance reminder through your automatic maintenance planning for customers with a corresponding maintenance contract
• Follow-up assignments from past orders
• Incidents transmitted by the connected Asset Monitoring system

In all of the cases listed, orders and related operations must be automatically "imported" from suggestions—such as maintenance reminders—or created manually. Through an integration with the ERP system, order data can be retrieved, thereby minimizing the effort required to create orders in the operational planning app.

In addition to simply creating a work order, there are other tasks involved in the preliminary planning of an Operation. This includes, for example, telephone coordination with the customer and the possible consideration of the customer's appointment requests. Depending on the type of operation, external service providers (external trades) must also be included in the planning process and coordinated. Finally, you need to define the scope of work (if applicable, per service object) and, if necessary, provide the Technician with any images and/or documents required to complete the job.

Especially during maintenance and repair operations, materials often need to be provided to carry out the work. If no work planning exists, the planner usually defines the required spare parts. In doing so, they should be able to refer to stored spare parts lists and information on installed components. Once the spare parts have been defined, it is necessary to inform Materials Management or the warehouse about the parts to be provided—including all relevant details such as the method of provision (shipping, pickup by a Technician) and, if necessary, the delivery address. This can be partially automated by initiating a workflow process.

Once the preliminary planning is complete, it's time to move on to the detailed planning. The specific dates and Technicians are determined here, if not already specified in the rough planning. Route planning is also carried out here - usually for the next working week. Partial automation allows the planning parameters "route, required qualifications and workload" to be taken into account and suggestions for suitable service technicians to be made on this basis.

Using the order backlog in the planning board, operations are then intuitively assigned to one or more Technicians via drag-and-drop. As soon as the deployment status is set to "Released", the Technician receives a corresponding notification within their mobile app. All relevant information on the customer, operations and the relevant service objects is displayed there. This completely eliminates the need for the dispatcher to manually compile information such as the customer's contact details.

Even after an assignment has been assigned to a Technician, changes may occur at short notice. The following factors mean that, despite digital operational planning, a high degree of flexibility is required:

• Operation cannot be completed on time, Technician needs longer, follow-up operations at risk, must be rescheduled
• Short-term adjustment of the scope of work on site (customer requests troubleshooting on another Asset that was not planned, machine is in worse condition than expected, etc.).
• Customer cancels the appointment at short notice, asks for postponement
• External service provider cancels (e.g. provision of a crane) and the operation can therefore not be carried out
• Service technician is absent at short notice due to illness

In all cases, scheduling must be supported by the dispatch planning software in order to be able to find flexible alternatives. Service technicians can also influence scheduling via the mobile app by—if necessary—creating operations independently through the service technician app or adding additional Assets/properties to the operation.

Particularly in the case of ad hoc operations, the direct integration between operational planning and the mobile service technician app offers enormous advantages that ensure the necessary flexibility in day-to-day operations.

As already mentioned in the first step, the operation planner’s responsibilities do not usually end once the operation has been successfully carried out. In addition, there is often the post-processing of service documents, checking of deployment times and completed logs as well as any planning of follow-up assignments. Approving invoices for billing and notifying clients of billing are also often part of the operational planning process.

You can find out more about the other tasks involved in post-operation follow-up and how ADASMA maintenance software can help you with them in future blog posts. Stay tuned.