With this article, we would like to empower managers in manufacturing companies to solve existing challenges in the area of repetitive activities with Operations1. This can mean optimizing an existing Operations1 use case or developing a new use case. You will receive practical explanations on how a problem can be transformed into a concrete solution.

There is a large number of different activities which have to be carried out on a regular basis by qualified employees. These activities come from various areas of the company and relate, for example, to the care of used machines (e.g. maintenance/repair), the facilities and their equipment (e.g. equipment inspection) or the employees' workplaces and processes (e.g. lean measures, audits, occupational safety, 5S measures, etc.).

Due to the different types of activities and the number of individual machines and equipment, a large number of parallel cycles follow as a consequence. For example, when a machine has to undergo weekly, monthly and annual maintenance, this already amounts to three cycles for a single machine. Together with the recurring activities from other areas, this quickly creates a confusing situation, which is usually exacerbated by the fact that there is no consolidated overview of the activities to be carried out in all areas.

For a more in-depth insight into the topic of Total Productive Maintenance, read the blog article on this topic.

To plan a recurring activity in Operations1, "rules" are the appropriate tool. Read on to find out how to create and manage a rule.

When planning and creating rules in Operations1, it is important to consider the number of cycles to be planned. How many maintenance cycles does machine A have? How many does machine B have? How often are the workstations inspected? The respective cycle is planned with a rule and the corresponding work instruction is attached as a document to the rules. The standardized creation and maintenance of rules creates a structured, consolidated overview of all recurring activities in the company.

Let's take the example of machine maintenance. Similar tasks are carried out across different machines in defined cycles. In this example, we assume that the machine is seen as the leading asset and not the inspection, i.e. employees focus on one machine and carry out all relevant inspections on it. Alternatively, a rule can be structured by inspection, allowing an employee to carry out the same inspection on several machines.

This problem can be solved in several ways. Each solution requires that a document exists for each type of inspection, which can be integrated as a module in overarching documents.

Subsequently, the procedure can be defined on two levels:

Let's assume that a rule is to be set up for all machines, but with one document per machine. The oil level of both machine A and machine B must be checked in a weekly cycle. Both machines require an oil change once every other month. Machine A must also be checked every morning during a regular working week to ensure that the filter fleece on the control cabinet is in good condition. The same check must also be carried out on machine B, but only once on Friday.

First of all, the rule can now be set up in a similar way to the logic known from regular appointments in Outlook. As we have defined the daily oil level check for machine A as the lowest frequency, the rule must also be set up for each day of the week.

The "Schedule individual steps" function can now be used for even more detailed scheduling at the level of individual process steps. This allows for the individual steps to be matched to the defined frequency.

A rule automatically creates scheduled orders and (if applicable) assigns those to an employee. The orders can now be found and processed.

The employee who is to carry out the task has two options for finding the corresponding order.

The Dashboard offers employees a consolidated view of all pending or past activities in the form of orders, tasks or reports.

Employees can find all pending orders in the "Orders" column. It may be necessary to reduce the orders to those personally assigned.

An order can be opened and started from the dashboard.

The "Orders" menu option provides a list of all pending and past orders. The tabular view can be sorted and filtered using numerous settings. In addition, employees can add or remove columns from the table. With the help of these tools, the view can be reduced to the orders that are relevant in the respective situation.

In addition, the "Orders" menu item offers a calendar view in which orders are displayed as bars based on their start and end dates. The calendar view can also be reduced using different filters.

The calendar view enables employees and planners to gain a high degree of transparency and understanding of upcoming activities and to react and prioritize accordingly.

As a user with permission to create orders, additional options are available to edit individual orders separately. As long as an order has not yet been opened, it only exists as a virtual order without an ID. It is therefore still linked to the rule and reflects all changes made to the rule. If another machine needs to be checked on a particular day, an order can be opened and modified. It is then given a unique ID and is decoupled from the rule. A change to the rule no longer affects this order. It can therefore be supplemented with a further document for the additional machine and is displayed to the worker accordingly during execution.

The work results resulting from processing the orders are available as reports in the menu item of the same name. Similar to the "Orders" menu, the tabular report overview can also be sorted and filtered using various parameters. This allows planners of recurring activities to quickly and easily access the relevant work results. The reports contain all data and values recorded during the execution of the activity. If follow-up activities are recorded in the form of a task during processing, these are referenced in the report result.

Both the tabular and the calendar-based order overview provide planners with information on the work progress of all orders ("Status" or "Progress" column). For quick differentiation, each order status is assigned a corresponding color, which is used in both views.

Within an order, an individual progress bar is displayed for each report so that you can see at a glance which work has already been completed and to what extent.