Configure workers for work order scheduling

• 10 minutes

Before you can begin to schedule work orders to be run, you first need to create a schedule for maintenance workers, tools, and assets. Your first task will be to create calendars and then assign them to your workers.

When you view a worker on the Workers page in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can view the resource that they are associated with and the calendar that is assigned to the resource.

To assign a worker to a calendar, you need to allocate a resource. The calendar that is associated to the resource will then be automatically assigned.

To see how to appoint resources and calendars to a worker, watch the following video.

Set up preferred maintenance workers

Before you schedule work orders, you can use Asset Management to make a preference when deciding which maintenance worker or worker group is allocated to complete a work order. This setup is not required to schedule work orders; however, it allows you to determine the most qualified maintenance worker to complete a job.

Keep in mind the following points if you are using this functionality:

• Preference can be set up based on worker skills and competencies.
• Only maintenance workers that are available at scheduling time can be scheduled.
• If a preferred worker is matched for a work order during scheduling and the worker is assigned to another job, the work order will be scheduled for another available maintenance worker.
• Workers and worker groups can be set up for preferred scheduling.

Workers or worker groups can be set up as a preferred worker or worker group in several ways, based on the following parameters:

• Trade – Skill that the worker possesses, for example, a mechanic or IT technician.
• Asset – Any type of equipment, such as a machine or a machine part that requires maintenance, service, or repair.
• Asset type – Defines the maintenance job types (and, therefore, the maintenance jobs) that can be performed on assets.
• Maintenance job type When you create a work order, you must select a maintenance job type. You can select only the maintenance job types that are related to the setup of the asset type that is used for the asset.
• Maintenance job type variant – Defines variations of a job type, such as sizes (small, medium, or large), periods (weekly, biweekly, one month, or three months), and configurations (low standard, flexible, or high performance).
• Maintenance job type category – Used to collect a group of maintenance job types for overview purposes.

Set up preferred workers

Use these steps to set up preferred workers for scheduling work orders. Keep in mind that you can make more than one selection for the same record; the more selections you make, the more specific the setup you will have.

1. Go to Asset Management > Setup > Workers > Preferred maintenance workers.
2. Select New on the Action Pane of the Preferred maintenance workers list page.
3. Select from the several fields on the line that you can configure:
   • Asset type
   • Asset
   • Maintenance job category
   • Maintenance job type
   • Maintenance job variant
   • Trade
   • Preferred maintenance worker group
   • Preferred maintenance worker

4. In the preceding screenshot, notice that Ted Howard will be the preferred worker for assets in the Air Compressor type, which are considered preventative work orders. Not all fields are required; they are determined by your organization depending on how specific you want to be when setting up preferred maintenance workers.
5. When you are finished configuring the fields, select Save on the Action Pane.