Organization basic data consists information of the following: Maintenance Organization, Employees, Craft and Teams.
Before entering employees, work orders, PM actions and standard jobs you need to define one or more Maintenance Organizations. This can be done in the Organization Basic Data/Maintenance Organizations tab. The Maintenance Organizations you enter should represent the different organizational units that exist within your business, which will be handling work orders within IFS Applications. A Maintenance Organization can also be used to organize employees into geographical areas, one geographical area being one Maintenance Organization.
Maintenance organizations are site dependent and therefore not global within a company. You can create several different maintenance organizations with the same name in different sites. Once individual maintenance organizations are created, they can be connected to form hierarchical structures. This is useful when you have field technicians that cover certain areas. You can only connect Maintenance Organizations that are located in the same site.
Work time calendars can also be connected to maintenance organizations. Work time calendars are define in IFS/Application Services.
To the Maintenance Organization you can connect employees, and the Maintenance Organization thus becomes the owner of personnel resources. Work orders and PM actions can be assigned to Maintenance Organizations, indicating which Maintenance Organization is responsible for planning and executing the work orders.
By assigning work order operations to employees, who belong to maintenance organizations you will also be able to analyze the total work load for a particular maintenance organization.
An hourly rate can be defined for the maintenance organization (entered in the Company's currency). The hourly rate is used to calculate the personnel cost when preparing a work order, PM action or standard job, or when reporting in a work order. The rate for a maintenance organization is only used if a craft ID is not defined.
If no craft id is defined, and if the Maintenance Organization's hourly rate is defined as zero, the cost defined on the sales part connected to the craft line or time report line will be used instead. This is useful if you wish to determine the internal personnel cost based on type of work or type of time spent on the work order.
A maintenance organization can be connected to a sales part in order to invoice the price of the maintenance organization to the customer.
Before you start creating a work order, you need to define employees. This is done in the IFS/Basic Data for Maintenance. An employee is a person who will be creating, preparing, executing, reporting in and/or authorizing work orders, or is responsible for managing these activities.
Depending on what is being done to the work order and when, an employee will take on different roles and the employee ID is used to define Reported by, Work Leader, Work Master, Prepared by, Signature and Authorizer on work orders.
The employee is connected to a maintenance organization. The employee can also be connected to one or several craft ID, indicating the skill set a certain employee has.
You can also specify the maximum load level for an employee that is searched via the Free Time Search logic or is displayed in the Resource Load Graph. Depending on the maximum load level, the affected employees planning and allocation time will be adjusted in the result from the free time search. The maximum load level can be a number between 0 and 100.
An employee can even be connected to a supplier. This will allow you to for example assign work orders to external suppliers, just like you assign work orders to employees.
A default operation filter can be defined for a person by connecting it to his or her employee ID. When this is done, operations will be displayed in the Work Order Operation List window based on the default filter. If a default filter is not defined for your user, all operations assigned to your user on all sites allowed to your user will be displayed in the Work Order Operation List window.
Before entering work orders, PM actions and standard jobs you need to define crafts. This can be done in the Organization Basic Data/Craft Catalog tab. The crafts you enter should represent the different competencies you have within your business such as electrician, welder, engineer, etc. The crafts can then be connected to employees according to their skills.
When preparing work orders, PM actions etc. you can define what craft ID is required to perform a certain task. When assigning work orders operations to employees, the craft ID helps you to ensure that a work order operation is assigned to an employee that has the necessary skills to perform the task. You can define an hourly rate for the craft using a currency of your choice that is available in the application.
Crafts can be connected to each other to form a structure. By forming craft structures you are able to link similar competencies together. E.g.,
Welder (Parent Craft)
|—Deposit Welder (Child Craft)
|—Pipe Welder (Child Craft)
|—TIG Welder (Child Craft)
|—MIG Welder (Child Craft)
Once the structure is formed the entire structure or individual crafts can be connected to a site. Crafts are site dependent, therefore it is possible to have the same craft ID in several different sites. The connected crafts will receive the site's currency and can have their own rate or cost (which is also site dependent). The rate defined is used to calculate the personnel cost when preparing a work order, PM action or standard job, or reporting in a work order. If the hourly rate is not defined for a craft ID, the hourly rate for the maintenance organization will be used. Furthermore, the craft connected to a site can also be connected to a HR (human resource) job, provided that IFS Human Resources is installed. This enables the system to check whether an employee with a specific craft connection has the required qualification (HR core competencies and licenses) to perform a work order operation.
Once a craft is defined and connected to a site the craft can be connected to a sales part. Connecting sales parts serves a dual purpose:
Since a craft is site dependant you can have several default sales parts for the same craft in different sites.
Once the employees have been defined, they can be grouped into maintenance teams. Maintenance teams consist of a single team leader and one or more team members (employees). When creating teams, employees can be grouped based on, for example, the competence, geographical location, etc. The maintenance team will belong to the same maintenance organization as the team leader. The team members included in the maintenance team can belong to different sites and maintenance organizations provided that they belong to the same company as the team leader. A single maintenance organization can have many maintenance teams. An employee can be a member of multiple teams as well as the leader of multiple teams.
In the context of heavy maintenance shop visits, the workforce is often organized into teams with a specific team leader assigned. Each team is responsible for performing the work assigned to them, where individual changes to the allocations can be made with short notice based on the progress of work.
The maintenance teams can be connected to the operation lines of a work order. Once connected, you will only be allowed to assign employees included in the maintenance team.
The life of a maintenance team can be limited by defining a time period for which the team would be valid. You can only assign the team to a work order operation if the date and time of the operation falls within the life span of the team.