It might happen that customer needs to plan activities that take up multiple days or weeks. It should be possible to automatically plan those activities with consideration of hard constraints like work time patterns. An activity has to be spanned over multiple days w/o the non-working time being calculated as a work time for the activity. Please refer to /PACG/ECM_WSCHD_CONF - Configuration of Work Schedule for more information about setting work patterns and configuration of work schedule.
For instance, a technician works 5 hours a day and there is an activity assigned to this person planned to take 10 hours. In such case, if of course it is allowed for given activity (there can be activities which must be processed continuously) system should be able to adjust total planned duration of the activity taking into account technician’s work plan and span it. In the given example the activity planned for 10 hours should be adjusted to fit technician’s working hours:
To handle this requirement new configuration options: Calculation of activity end time and PlanDur Type were added in /PACG/ECM_VSCTD - Service Call types definition
The configuration of the End date/time calculation type (Calculation of activity end time) controls the way how activity’s end time is calculated. The available options are:
No Calculation – leaves values as they are (self-explanatory)
Add work – if this option is selected and work time is not initial, then activity’s end time is calculated in a following way: Activity.StartTime + WorkTime
Add duration - if this option is selected and work time is not initial, then activity’s end time is calculated in a following way: Activity.StartTime + DurationTime
The configuration of planned duration type PlanDur Type controls span of the activities. Following are available options:
Not defined – same as Manual
AUTOMATIC - The Planned Duration is derived as PlanEnd - PlanStart - non-working hours.
MANUAL - The Planned Duration is derived as PlanEnd - PlanStart, any reservation, non-working hour is not considered. This is the usual way the system behaves as per today.
MANUAL_FIX - This is the same as MANUAL with the only difference that the planner cannot switch to AUTOMATIC mode. This is relevant for specific activities coming from the ERP.
As the result the table /PACG/ECM_ACTI has been extended with additional fields:
DURATION - Duration in minutes (Normal duration of the activity )
PLDURATION - Planned duration in minutes (Work involved in the activity )
PD_TYPE - Planned duration type