Cleaning Up Your Preventative Maintenance Activator
Have you ever run the Activator and found that a job didn’t get raised? Or it takes longer than you think it should? Chances are you’re running your policies with some unnecessary options switched on. Here is one easy thing you can check which can increase not only the speed, but the consistency of the Activator.
Is It Actually a Hierarchy?
When setting up a Preventative Maintenance policy, there are a few PM types available for use.
- Standard Job
- Fixed
- Hierarchy
- Triggered
We will take a look at Hierarchy for this article. What is a Hierarchy PM type? Well, a hierarchy is when you have a policy that is meant to interact with another one, and prevent you from raising unnecessary work orders which are already covered by another service routine. For example, if you have a 3 monthly and a 6 monthly policy which overlap every second occurrence, when the 6 monthly raises, it will tell the 3 monthly it isn’t needed and only raise one job.
You can read up about configuring a hierarchy’s dates from here: Adjusting Preventative Maintenance Last Done Dates
Running a hierarchy is fairly common practice, but what about when you actually want both jobs to raise, or the policy is just a standalone routine. It is times like these that you actually don’t need to tick hierarchy and you can switch it off.
When hierarchy is turned on, you’re telling MEX that you might have another policy which is eligible for suppression. Hierarchy uses a complex formula to calculate how far out a policy can suppress another, based on due dates. That means extra processing time is needed, when there really is no reason for it.
As well as the extra work MEX has to do, in the event that it does find something to suppress, you’re not going to get that job created, as you’ve told the program that the one doing the suppression is all you need.
Clean Up The Activator
If you think you might be guilty of an unnecessary hierarchy, it’s not that hard to clean up at all. Start by opening the Activator and then filtering all of your policies by whether they have hierarchy switched on or not. If you’re unsure about filters, you can always just sort the column to see ticked and unticked policies are grouped together.
You can undo the filter by clicking the Clear button
Once you’ve got all of your hierarchy policies in front of you, just look at each one and check if there is another policy it should be linked with. If there’s nothing you can see, open up the policy by clicking on the PM number hyperlink and then untick the Hierarchy checkbox.
Have a go and if you have any issues or questions with Cleaning the Activator, our support team is ready to help you out. Contact them at support@mex.com.au or call +61 7 3392 4777