The Problem

Suppose that you want all of the equipment in Ward 1 to be on a single, 12-monthly schedule. If you’ve read any of the previous articles on PPM scheduling then this will be simple:

1. On the equipment summary screen find all of the equipment in Ward 1

2. Select all of the records (Ctrl+A)

3. Right-click and choose Add the selected assets to a PPM Schedule

4. A dialog box appears which allows you to select the appropriate schedule, and which also asks if the first job should be created. You can also enter a planned date for the jobs that will be created.

This is all pretty standard stuff. When you do this the system will create 1 job for each device on the schedule. The important thing to note is that each of these jobs will be identical. Automated PPM scheduling creates these (and future) jobs by either using the job template specified on the PPM schedule screen, or with the simplified approach of using the work instructions, job type, status and priority from the schedule.

The interesting question is: what do you do if you want different jobs to be created for different types of equipment?

PPM Schedules and Template Inheritance

Starting from version 1.19.0 it is possible to link a job template to both models and equipment categories. For example, you could create a job template which defines how to carry out the maintenance on an MS26 Daily Rate Syringe Driver, and link that directly to the MS26 model. You could create a different template for a particular type of equipment, such as scales, and link that template to the scales, baby scales and chair scales categories.

All that is left to do is to tell the PPM schedule to use these alternative templates (if they exist). This is done on the PPM schedule property page.

This is done with the new Inherit templates from models and categories check-box.

Now, whenever a job is created automatically for a device by the automated PPM scheduling mechanism the system will check to see if a PPM job template has been specified for the model: if so the new job will be created based on that. If not, the category is then checked to see if a template has been linked to that. If so, then it will be used. If both of these find no alternative template, then the template linked to the PPM schedule will be used (as in previous versions of E-Quip)