I am assisting with setting up PM schedules for a large institution that has a couple thousand assets. Each asset may require up to 10 different technicians to work on them (for example a single machine that has plumbing, mechanical, alarm, gas (such as oxygen or natural gas), high voltage electrical, electronics, fire suppression, noise suppression, hvac, etc...). Each asset will have annual "major" and periodic "minor" maintenance work that requires different technicians. For example, 1 asset will have 1 major and 3 minor work orders for each of the 10 technicians, therefore that one piece of equipment will have 1*(1+3)*10 = 40 work orders over the course of the year. Multiply that by 2000 assets, and you have 80,000 PM work orders to spread over the year.
Is there a way to automate that? We want to plan for what work should be done by each technician over the course of the year so that we have a reasonably level utilization for each technician. We want to avoid having all the major work orders be assigned in a narrow date range because there would not be enough hours in the day to get that much work done. How does anyone else deal with this problem?
Years ago I worked as a developer for a company that had a main-frame application that dealt with this problem but I do not see any feature like that in FSA. I looked at RSO and that seems to be best suited for routing technicians that have multiple stops, such as home AC repair service (or am I wrong?). If RSO is the answer, can it create the work orders months in advance - we need to know what work is planned well in advance to insure that supporting logistics (parts, subcontractor schedules, etc.) can be organized. Much of the work is being performed by subcontractors and we have no control over who is dispatched from the subcontractor or when, so parts, scheduling and routing are not important.
If this is an unresolved problem that others are solving with whiteboards and spreadsheets, I would like to hear about that too.
