Maintenance Scheduling

Maintenance work can now be planned, not just recorded. Each task on a maintenance order can carry a scheduled start date, with its end worked out for you from the estimated hours. The order shows the rolled-up window those tasks add up to, the system keeps an eye on whether a day's planned work fits the maintenance team's available hours, and the Maintenance Schedule board lets you place and move the work on a shared timeline. This guide covers all three.

How maintenance scheduling works

Until now a maintenance order had no schedule: it was raised, worked whenever there was time, and closed on the day you happened to key it in. Scheduling adds a plan on top of that, without changing how you record the work itself. There are three parts to it:

  1. Scheduling each task: every task on an order can carry a planned start date, and the order window rolls up from those task dates.
  2. The team-capacity picture: flag the people who do maintenance, and the system works out how many maintenance hours are available each day and compares that against the work you have scheduled.
  3. The Maintenance Schedule board: a timeline you open from the Maintenance Orders list, where you drag the work onto the days you want it done.

Scheduling sits alongside the rest of equipment maintenance. The setup, tasks, and rules are covered in the Maintenance Setup guide, and working and posting an order is covered in the Maintenance Orders guide. Scheduling adds the planning layer; you still record each task's result and cost on the order itself.

Scheduling a task

Each task on a maintenance order can carry a Scheduled Start. Set it, and the Scheduled End is worked out for you and shown read-only. The end is calculated by laying the task's estimated hours across the working days from the start, skipping non-working days (weekends and bank holidays) using the unit's base calendar, and using a standard working-day hours figure from setup to decide how many hours fit in one day.

For example, with a standard day of seven hours, a sixteen-hour task starting on a Monday lays out as seven hours on Monday, seven on Tuesday, and the remaining two on Wednesday, so the Scheduled End is the Wednesday. A task that starts on a Friday and needs three working days lands on Friday, then Monday, then Tuesday, because the weekend is skipped.

Maintenance Order Task - schedule
Scheduled Start
The planned start date for this task. You set this; it is the one date on the schedule you control directly. Change it and the end re-derives straight away.
Scheduled End
The planned end date, worked out from the Scheduled Start and the task's estimated hours laid over working days. Read-only, so it always reflects the start and the estimate without you having to keep it in step by hand.

A task that was raised by a maintenance rule seeds its Scheduled Start on its own. A calendar (time-interval) rule seeds the start from the rule's due date, so scheduled and overdue work lands on the calendar the moment the order is raised, ready for you to fine-tune. Tasks from meter or event rules, and tasks you add by hand, seed their start from the order's Order Date. Whatever the seed, you can always move it.

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The Scheduled End follows the estimate. If you revise a task's Est. Time (Hours), the end recalculates from the same Scheduled Start, so a job that grows or shrinks keeps an honest finish date.

The order window

The maintenance order header shows the window that its tasks add up to. Scheduled From is the earliest task start on the order and Scheduled To is the latest task end. As you schedule tasks or move them around, the window follows, so the header always tells you the span of planned work without you maintaining it yourself.

Maintenance Order - window
Scheduled From
The earliest scheduled start across this order's tasks, the start of the order's planned window. Read-only; it cannot drift from the tasks.
Scheduled To
The latest scheduled end across this order's tasks, the end of the order's planned window. Read-only; it follows the tasks.

Setup: the standard working-day hours

Deriving a task's end from its estimated hours needs to know how many hours of work count as one full day. That figure lives in the Maintenance area of the Essential Rental Setup page.

Essential Rental Setup - Maintenance
Maintenance Standard Day (Hours)
How many working hours count as one full day when laying a task's estimated hours across working days to derive its Scheduled End. Set it to the length of a normal workshop day in your yard. For example, at seven hours a fourteen-hour task fills two working days; at eight hours it would spill an extra hour into a third. If it is left blank, eight hours is used.

The same figure is used by the team-capacity picture below to set how many hours one full-time worker contributes in a day, so a single setting keeps the planned durations and the available hours on the same footing.

Closed Date and the posting date

The maintenance order's Closed Date is now editable, and it controls the posting date for the maintenance entries. When you complete and close the order, the Closed Date is used as the posting date for those entries (the maintenance ledger entry, the cost entries, and any certificate dates). Leave it blank and the work date at the moment of closing is used instead.

Use it to record a completion on the day the work actually happened rather than the day you key it in. If a unit was finished and back on the road last Friday but you are only catching up with the paperwork on Monday, set the Closed Date to the Friday before you close.

Maintenance Order - close
Closed Date
The date the order is closed and the work posted. Leave it blank to use the work date at the moment you close. Set it to record the completion on the day the work was actually done. It cannot be earlier than the Order Date, since a unit cannot be closed before its order was raised.

The team-capacity picture

Scheduling work is only half the story; you also want to know whether a day's planned work actually fits the people you have. The team-capacity picture answers that. It compares the maintenance hours available on each day (the supply) against the hours scheduled on the tasks for that day (the demand), and flags the days where the scheduled work is more than the team can do.

Flagging your maintenance workers

The people who carry out maintenance are set up as Business Central resources. On the resource card, in the Essential Rental area, flag each one as a maintenance worker and give them an efficiency percentage.

Resource Card - Essential Rental
Maintenance Worker
Marks this resource as part of the maintenance team. Only flagged resources count towards the available hours. Leave it off for resources that have nothing to do with maintenance.
Maint. Efficiency %
The share of a standard maintenance day this worker is available for scheduled maintenance. 100 percent means a full standard working day of capacity. A lower figure suits someone who only spends part of their time on maintenance: set 50 percent for a worker who is on maintenance for half their day. A blank or zero value is treated as 100.

How the available hours are worked out

For each day, the available maintenance hours is the total of your flagged workers' hours. Each worker contributes the standard working-day hours scaled by their efficiency percentage, but only on the days they actually work. A worker's working days follow their own base calendar (through their resource group), so a team with a different shutdown is handled on its own calendar. Three full-time workers on an eight-hour standard day give twenty-four available hours on a clear working day, and nothing on a day their calendar treats as closed.

The scheduled work for a day is the sum of the task hours landing on it, taken from the tasks' estimated hours laid over the working days exactly as the Scheduled End is derived. Only tasks on orders that are still Open or In Progress count; closed and posted orders are history, not load. Where the scheduled hours for a day are more than the available hours, that day is flagged as over, so you can move work off it or bring in cover.

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If the team seems to have capacity on a day you know the yard is shut (a bank holiday, or a works shutdown over Christmas), set those days as non-working on the relevant resource group's base calendar. That is what the available-hours figure follows.

The Maintenance Schedule board

The Maintenance Schedule board brings all of this together on one timeline. Open it from the Maintenance Orders list using the Maintenance Schedule action.

Each open or in-progress maintenance order is a row. Its tasks appear as draggable bars on a shared date axis underneath it, and the order's whole window (its Scheduled From to Scheduled To) shows as a thin marker spanning the row, so you can see the order's span and its individual tasks at the same time.

Rescheduling work

Drag a task bar onto a different day to reschedule it. That writes the task's Scheduled Start, recalculates its Scheduled End from the estimated hours, and rolls the order window up again, and the capacity reading at the bottom updates with the move. The board is the same plan as the order page, just shown as a timeline, so a change made either way is the change.

The bars are colour-coded by where the order has got to. Tasks belonging to an order that is still Open show in a lighter teal, and tasks of an In Progress order show in solid teal, so you can tell at a glance which work has started. An arrow links each task to the one that follows it on the same order.

The capacity lane

Along the bottom is a capacity lane, labelled Team capacity: one cell per day. Each cell fills as the scheduled hours approach the team's available hours for that day, and turns red on the days you are over. As you drag work around, the lane redraws, so you can level a busy day by eye and watch the red clear.

Getting around the board

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The board is for planning the timing of the work. You still record each task's result and cost, and complete and close the order, on the maintenance order itself, covered in the Maintenance Orders guide.
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For a read-only view of the whole fleet, including hires and quotes alongside maintenance, see the Availability Board guide.