Visual Planner Suite

 Smart solutions are those that perform the way people act within their workplace.

Smart solutions simplify, automate and do more with less energy.

Smart solutions provide visibility to people, places and assets in their operating context.

The Visual Planner™ is the 2011 Integrated Service Management Excellence Award winning solution that provides advanced work backlog management features and planning & scheduling functions effective in:

1. Achieving Effective Maintenance with Lean Planning & Scheduling
2. Visualizing Daily Work Backlog in its Operational Context
3. Repeating Operational excellence with Smart Schedules
4. Automating processes with Smart Resource Leveling
5. Measuring and controlling workforce quality with Visual Schedule compliance
6. Visualizing Availability with Smart Calendars

Achieving Lean Maintenance with effective Planning & Scheduling

In order to be competitive in today’s global market, enterprises must embrace a lean environment strategy and as part of it, implement Effective Asset Management to maximize profits from their existing asset investment. In their business transformation journey, many enterprises have implemented the most common maintenance tactics, but in most cases have not achieved their overall objectives and are still struggling to get out of the reactive mode. The key to achieving lean maintenance objectives is to also implement Effective Planning and Scheduling. This will ensure that maintenance tactics work is carried out in the minimum amount of time with the highest labor productivity.

Visualizing Daily Work Backlog in its Operational Context

Consistent with the engineering concept that you cannot improve what you cannot measure; CiM Maintenance understands that you cannot change what you cannot see. So we dedicated our knowledge, our vision and our resources to create embedded Maximo applications that are highly visual and smart.
Akin to ‘heads-up windscreen displays’ used in aerospace the Visual Planner Suite transforms enterprise asset data into high integrity operational information displayed in bright and clear calendar views enabling Planners, Scheduler and Supervisors to work smarter. With this unobstructed view they are able to see and work with their work orders in operating context with simple mouse click and drag and drop features.

Repeating Operations Excellence success with ‘Smart Schedules’

Using the Schedule Editor in Visual Scheduler application, Schedulers / Supervisors can create weekly schedules aligning operational priorities, maintenance priorities and work order backlog to asset availability. Often you will find a schedule that just works – let’s call that a ‘Smart Schedule’, one that is harmonic and productive. So how do we repeat that successful scenario?  The Schedule Manager feature allows for smarter schedule scenarios to be created, peer reviewed, shared and safely secured within Maximo database.  This feature lends itself to root cause analysis where schedule is a factor. Using Smart Schedules results in minutes saved during each planning cycle equating to person/hours of human effort per week and kilowatts of electrical energy per month.

Automating processes with Smart Resource Leveling

Using the Smart Resource Leveling feature takes the guess work out of planning & scheduling enabling Operations and Maintenance Managers to emulate and repeat successful planning and scheduling tactics. This rules-based feature allows for the definition, automation, execution and governance of decision measures like priority, status, availability and workload to automatically plan, schedule and assign work. The trusted automation of the planning and scheduling process has significant time, cost and energy saving benefits. Try measuring schedule compliance by calculating the human energy and kilowatts consumed per schedule breaker – now multiple these by escalating energy costs. Something worth doing is worth doing smarter – using the Visual Planner Suite.

Visualizing Availability with Smart Calendars

We created Smart Calendars as a response to the need to visualize the availability of people, places and asset within a dynamic world. Overlaying these transparent layers of Labor, Location and Asset Calendar provides the Operations and Maintenance Teams with near-real time multi-dimensional view of their world.   Smart Calendars feed the Smart Manager and Smart Resource Leveling applications with all the information needed to calculate, emulate and deploy a Smart Schedule.

• Smart Labor Calendars provides ‘heads-up’ display of people calendars that handle the changes in crew, craft, and labor availability within the reality of the human dynamic. When people get sick, book vacation, take training and change work cycles, the Smart Labor Calendars allow Managers / Supervisors to quickly change labor status and availability with a few simple clicks.
• Smart Location Calendars provided a quick and simple view of the availability of physical plant and work assets locations. This shortens the preparation time for shutdown / turnaround planning and gives Operations Managers method to calendar their requirements within the work management system.
• Smart Asset Calendars produces a clear calendar view for revenue generating asset / work equipment availability that can be managed manually of integrated to external process systems (PLC, SCADA) for added process automation.

Measuring and controlling Work quality with Visual Schedule Editor

The reality of a dynamic maintenance environment is that schedule change is inevitable and a common occurrence resulting in suspending work and changing assignments. Managing and controlling deviation from work plans and schedules is a key factor to improving workforce quality, utilization and increasing uptime. The Visual Scheduler’s Schedule Compliance feature allows work schedules to be quickly reviewed, approved and finalized. Once a schedule is ‘locked down’ work activity with the schedule can be easily visualized, monitored and measured with opportunities to assign a reason code to the deviation. In the same way ‘mean time between failure’ (MBTF) is used to improve equipment reliability, ‘schedule compliance root cause’ (SCRC) can be used to improve work scheduling and execution patterns.