​An outage or shutdown is a time window when many preventive maintenance tasks can be carried out. This blog discusses the use of PMs in Calem to facilitate the outage or shutdown planning.

Step 1. Define PM Plans and PMs

The first step is to enumerate all the maintenance tasks for an outage or shutdown. For instance, an outage of a production assembly line involves several maintenance tasks. A planner will develop PM Plans and PMs for each task:

  • Define a PM Plan for each task. A PM Plan includes labor, material and steps for a maintenance task.
    • Menu path: Preventive Maintenace | PM Plan
  • Next, create a PM which consists of a PM Plan and an asset or a location to which the PM Plan is applied.
    • Menu path: Preventive Maintenance | PM list


Step 2. Define PM Plans and PMs for Outage Planning

Next step is to define PM Plans and PMs for outage planning. For each outage of an asset or location,

  • Define a PM Plan for an outage. The PM Plan may have a repeat schedule if the outage is done with a fixed schedule. Otherwise, you may leave the repeat schedule empty.
  • Next, define a PM for an outage. Assign the PM Plan defined above, an asset or a location the outage is for.
  • Finally, add PMs defined in Step 1 to this PM so that when this PM is turned into a work order, all the PMs included in it will be created as child work orders.
    • Go to "Dependency" Tab in the PM form and add child PMs developed in Step 1.


3. Create Work Orders for Outage Planning

The outage work orders will be generated automatically by Calem if fixed schedules are used for outage planning (see Step 2). Otherwise, one may manually create outage work orders:

  • Menu path: Work Order | Create WO | Create from PM
  • Select a parent PM created in Step 2 to create work order.
  • A outage parent work order is created along with child work orders each from a child PM included in the parent outage PM.