Visual Planner Suite: Designed specifically to ensure your day-to-day reliability program’s execution with Maximo

CiM’s complete asset management strategy solution includes the implementation of IBM Maximo to develop the reliability program, as well as Visual Planner Suite, our own embedded visual solution for Maximo.

IBM Maximo includes excellent functionality to develop the reliability program, but very little to ensure its efficient and timely execution. Interfaces with project management tools like Microsoft Project, Primavera P6, as well as the recently introduced Maximo Scheduler have been offered by IBM to address this gap, but we strongly believe that day-to-day maintenance requires a different approach than projects and that project management tools are not well suited for it. Most Maximo users who have tried using a project management tool for day-to-day scheduling share the same opinion, as the majority of them have abandoned those tools and are instead downloading their Maximo data into spreadsheets. They have kept the project management tools to manage shutdowns and outages, which correspond more closely to projects with milestone delivery dates. Using spreadsheets works to some extent, but it’s quite laborious, so CiM has developed Visual Planner Suite specifically to address this gap by extending Maximo functionality and allowing users to quickly and efficiently perform the planning, scheduling and supervision tasks required to manage day-to-day maintenance directly in Maximo.

Visual Planner Suite offers a unique calendar approach, specifically designed to suit day-to-day maintenance scheduling, managing weekly schedule agreements and monitoring schedule compliance.

With Visual Planner Suite you can quickly and easily perform all the planning and scheduling tasks directly in Maximo:

• View PM forecast and determine the resources required to perform the maintenance tactics
• Balance workload and ensure sufficient labor capacity to perform the maintenance tactics and required corrective actions
• Plan work requests in order to meet target dates
• Create optimized weekly schedules, taking into account resource availability: labor, assets, materials, services, etc.
• Increase the efficiency of weekly schedule meetings
• Promote teamwork between maintenance and operations
• Assign work and distribute daily schedule assignments to labor in advance
• Manage asset and labor non-availability (sick days, vacation time, etc.)
• Make daily schedule adjustments
• Close work orders and report work completion information in minimal time
• Monitor schedule compliance to drive improvement

Speed up the planning, scheduling and assignment processes. Spend less time on the keyboard and more time working with your team to achieve the highest work quality.

Architecture and user interface

Visual Planner Suite is completely embedded in Maximo, each module being a clone of a Maximo application, with the same look and feel as standard Maximo modules. This allows for seamless adoption by planners, schedulers, supervisors and craftspeople who are used to working with Maximo. Visual Planner Suite leverages Maximo’s powerful querying capabilities and offers a number of different calendar views that enable efficient planning, scheduling and execution processes within Maximo. Each one of the calendar views is easy to read, user-friendly and greatly simplifies the work planning and scheduling effort with quick and easy click and drag and drop capability.

• Easy to learn and built-in Maximo user interface ensures immediate user adoption, resulting in rapid return on investment
• No interface required – no need to access external information to create schedules – no additional administration tasks or training needed
• Low cost of ownership – installs on the Maximo application environment
• Known technology by your Maximo IT support team – developed 100% with Maximo framework, unlike other scheduling tools available for Maximo
• Works within Maximo business objects, workflow and security to allow for strict governance, compliance and automation of business practices
• Single point of truth – all schedules are created directly in Maximo with no external applications – everything on one screen with the ability to hyperlink directly to any related Maximo applications