Hello everyone,

We have a customer who recently started using Maximo Scheduler and is really trying to get everything possible out of the product.
They work with many rotating shifts, each consisting of five work periods. It's a complex setup, but it works very well.

However, they've now encountered the next problem/issue/challenge. I won't go into their full shift structure, but I'll simplify it to a basic example:

Let's say we have 3 shifts: morning, afternoon, and night. These rotate over a 3-week cycle. For example:

• Week/Shift pattern: 1M, 2A, 3N, 4M, 5A, 6N, etc.

Now, on a Monday, a technician tells us that starting next week, he wants to switch to a different rotation.
Instead of continuing with the Afternoon shift, he wants to follow the shift that is scheduled for Night that week.
So the pattern would change from:
1M, 2A, 3N, 4M, 5A, 6N → 1M, 2N, 3M, 4A, 5N, 6M, etc.

If I change his shift today, it disrupts the current week's planning.
But if I wait and change it next Monday morning, I can't plan anything for the upcoming week yet.
How do we solve this?

Yes, this example only involves a single technician, so technically it could be adjusted manually.
But we need to scale this to at least 16 teams on a 112-day rotation.

My current idea is to move away from using Shift assignments entirely, and instead use MODAVAIL (Modify Availability), supported by a custom app to populate and update it. All other Maximo processes would continue to run normally.

Still, I would expect Maximo to offer a native way to change future shift assignments for multiple technicians without disrupting the current schedule.
Unfortunately, I haven't found such a method yet - which is why I'm reaching out for your help.

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Willie de Wit
MACS
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Hi Willie,

Calendars/Shifts are used to define a pattern of working time for multiple labor, crews or assets. When you need to modify this for an individual use the Modified Availability on the Person or Crew. Easiest tool is Graphical Resource View.

Maximo Calendars are designed to be shared, if you use them for individuals this is, I'm afraid, wrong. The Scheduler applications only allow you to reference one calendar, so you do need to make sure the calendar is being shared by multiple labor, otherwise you might find you only have one labor in the graphical applications.

A person/crew can only reference one shift of a calendar, which as you discovered means that while you can change their shift it will effect all time periods, past, current and future. Therefore best to change their individual availability, although this does mean that filtering by shift will mean that you won't capture the person who is working the new shift for the week.

Regards - Andrew

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Andrew Jeffery
Maximo SME
ZNAPZ b.v
Barnstaple
+44 (0)777 1847873
------------------------------

Hi Willie, 

We have had the same issue / challenge. We had to deal with many different teams, and with stand by ressources. Somtimes with the same Team and same time with other teams. 

So the ressoruce should be marked Stand by for a precise day , so the coodinator don't affect any job for that period. 

We used MODVAIL of type WORK with a precise color so that the coordinators can directly make the difference. 

Our feedback is that modifying the ressources availability for one day or two it seems easy but if you have many changes, it is a little bit tricky using maximo directly. The client made the choice to import via excel, one a week, the ressources availability changes. 

I have that will help you. 

------------------------------
Ramzi Hadiji
Maximo expert
VAGANET
Vélizy-Villacoublay
0689105320
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Wed April 30, 2025 03:46 AM
From: Andrew Jeffery
Subject: How to schedule future shift changes in Maximo without breaking the current roster?

Hi Willie,

Calendars/Shifts are used to define a pattern of working time for multiple labor, crews or assets. When you need to modify this for an individual use the Modified Availability on the Person or Crew. Easiest tool is Graphical Resource View.

Maximo Calendars are designed to be shared, if you use them for individuals this is, I'm afraid, wrong. The Scheduler applications only allow you to reference one calendar, so you do need to make sure the calendar is being shared by multiple labor, otherwise you might find you only have one labor in the graphical applications.

A person/crew can only reference one shift of a calendar, which as you discovered means that while you can change their shift it will effect all time periods, past, current and future. Therefore best to change their individual availability, although this does mean that filtering by shift will mean that you won't capture the person who is working the new shift for the week.

Regards - Andrew

------------------------------
Andrew Jeffery
Maximo SME
ZNAPZ b.v
Barnstaple
+44 (0)777 1847873
------------------------------

This does not exist in Maximo out of the box - I think what we need is the capability to track the ShiftID that is assigned to each laborcode in a calendar object similar to workperiod.

Then provide the actions to perform a temporary shift change e.g. between 2 dates OR permanent change of shift from a specified date forward.

I think the temporary change would like you suggest need the MODAVAIL records updating based on these changes.

However for the permanent shift change you would also want the shift on the labor record updating on the given action date for consistency in the data. 

There is an Idea already in the Aha portal - ref: MASSCHDULR-I-176 which you could vote for to try and add some traction as this is currently flagged as a future consideration and states the following:

Ability to associate multiple shifts and use this show availability in GS/GA

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Steve Lee
Maximo Technical Sales Specialist
IBM
Leeds
------------------------------

Here is the direct link:  Ability to associate | IBM Sustainability Software - Ideas Portal

https://ibm-ai-apps.ideas.ibm.com/ideas/MASSCHDULR-I-176

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Gertjan Zomerdijk
Gemba Services b.v.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Wed April 30, 2025 03:52 AM
From: Steve Lee
Subject: How to schedule future shift changes in Maximo without breaking the current roster?

This does not exist in Maximo out of the box - I think what we need is the capability to track the ShiftID that is assigned to each laborcode in a calendar object similar to workperiod.

Then provide the actions to perform a temporary shift change e.g. between 2 dates OR permanent change of shift from a specified date forward.

I think the temporary change would like you suggest need the MODAVAIL records updating based on these changes.

However for the permanent shift change you would also want the shift on the labor record updating on the given action date for consistency in the data. 

There is an Idea already in the Aha portal - ref: MASSCHDULR-I-176 which you could vote for to try and add some traction as this is currently flagged as a future consideration and states the following:

Ability to associate multiple shifts and use this show availability in GS/GA

Our client schedules work six months in advance. Within the organization, employees frequently change departments, which often results in shifts in their work patterns. These changes are planned ahead. For instance, if an employee is set to move from Department A to Department B in two months, their current shift pattern should be displayed for the next two months, and their availability should reflect the new shift pattern thereafter.

Currently in Maximo, the relationship between person to calendar/shift object is one-to-many, but it lacks an effective date. Adding an effective date and GS/GA or other application using this date and shift combination would allow the system to accurately reflect availability based on the appropriate shift pattern.

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Steve Lee
Maximo Technical Sales Specialist
IBM
Leeds
------------------------------

Hi Willie,

This sounds very similar to the issues we have with our rotating rosters and people changing to new shift patterns in future periods.  We have not found a suitable solution for this which has limited our use of Graphical Scheduler.  In our example we have 8 teams who work across a 96-week roster pattern (12 x 8wks) and they often change patterns in future periods.  We've tried several ways to implement this, including using MODAVAIL, but all are clunky and haven't been accepted by the users.  We will probably give a vote to the idea shared by Steve Lee as this is the sort of thing we're after.

Regards,

Scott Taylor

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Scott Taylor
Specialist Business Systems
Port Waratah Coal Services
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You could consider a minor configuration and and escalation.

Add a Child Table Object to Labor - LaborScheduleChange
Alter the Labor Application to view this table as a grid and ensure you can add new rows.
Have the table include fields like laborcode, orgid, effectivedate, newcalendar, new shift and a completed checkbox.
The date field should be a date, not a datetime.
The newcalendar and newshiftnum fields should be tabledomain lookups of active calendar and shift data.

You can then add rows per labor, describing your change plan

Next, create an escalation running daily at say 00:05, looking for laborschedulechage records that have completed=false and effectivedate<sysdate
The escalation would have an action group that does this:

Set LABOR.CALENDAR to LaborScheduleChange.NewCalendar
Set LABOR.SHIFTNUM to LaborScheduleChange.NewShiftNum
Set LaborScheduleChange.Completed = True.

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Scott Mahon
------------------------------

These changes would indeed be the first step to allow you to manage the future planned shift changes and also automate the updates at the correct time.

What I think is needed from a product perspective and hopefully part of the idea enhancement is for the Maximo Scheduling application to use the future workperiods for each labour resource into account - including the optimisation models so they optimise the schedule based on the future planned shift changes etc

I think this is effectively keeping the MODAVAIL in line with planned shift changes as well as the usual vacation, time off etc

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Steve Lee
Maximo Technical Sales Specialist
IBM
Leeds
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Thu May 01, 2025 02:01 PM
From: Scott Mahon
Subject: How to schedule future shift changes in Maximo without breaking the current roster?

You could consider a minor configuration and and escalation.

Add a Child Table Object to Labor - LaborScheduleChange
Alter the Labor Application to view this table as a grid and ensure you can add new rows.
Have the table include fields like laborcode, orgid, effectivedate, newcalendar, new shift and a completed checkbox.
The date field should be a date, not a datetime.
The newcalendar and newshiftnum fields should be tabledomain lookups of active calendar and shift data.

You can then add rows per labor, describing your change plan

Next, create an escalation running daily at say 00:05, looking for laborschedulechage records that have completed=false and effectivedate<sysdate
The escalation would have an action group that does this:

Set LABOR.CALENDAR to LaborScheduleChange.NewCalendar
Set LABOR.SHIFTNUM to LaborScheduleChange.NewShiftNum
Set LaborScheduleChange.Completed = True.

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Scott Mahon
------------------------------

Hi Willie,

I read the feed and I can see 2 different scenarios:

1. Changing the shift from A to B across the entire calendar for a single labour. This would typically correspond to a complete change of the work pattern for the labour in question. In this case, go ahead and change the shift either in the labour application or any of the scheduling applications where labour resources are shown. The existing assignments in the future won't change.
2. One occasional swap between colleague labour. Create for each labour 2 "modify availability" records with different reason codes respectively PERS./EXTRA WORK for labour 1 and EXTRA WORK/PERS for labour 2.

Here is when it gets interesting for both cases.

Go to the Graphical assignment application and you should see your labour turning Yellow. This is an indication that the assignment is not planned within the shift or that he's simply not available anymore.

In conclusion, use the graphical resource view as recommended by Andrew for better view of the availability, and make use of Graphical assignment as a dashboard to fix the eventual conflicts which might have caused by the change.

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karim gmir
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 5/13/2025 11:16:00 AM
From: karim gmir
Subject: RE: How to schedule future shift changes in Maximo without breaking the current roster?

Hi Willie,

I read the feed and I can see 2 different scenarios:

1. Changing the shift from A to B across the entire calendar for a single labour. This would typically correspond to a complete change of the work pattern for the labour in question. In this case, go ahead and change the shift either in the labour application or any of the scheduling applications where labour resources are shown. The existing assignments in the future won't change.
2. One occasional swap between colleague labour. Create for each labour 2 "modify availability" records with different reason codes respectively PERS./EXTRA WORK for labour 1 and EXTRA WORK/PERS for labour 2.

Here is when it gets interesting for both cases.

Go to the Graphical assignment application and you should see your labour turning Yellow. This is an indication that the assignment is not planned within the shift or that he's simply not available anymore.

In conclusion, use the graphical resource view as recommended by Andrew for better view of the availability, and make use of Graphical assignment as a dashboard to fix the eventual conflicts which might have caused by the change.

------------------------------
karim gmir
------------------------------