facilities planned maintenance

[benbaldwin]

A customer is wanting to use the planned maintenance module to generate facilities requests for preventive maintenance on all of their facilities equipment. Getting the maintenance plans and schedules set up was pretty straight forward. What isn't so clear is how to set when the planned maintenance should execute for the first time. Right now all of the equipment is scheduled for service every 90 or 180 days, but they are all falling on roughly the same dates instead of having the workload spread out. Any suggestions on how the initial maintenance can be scheduled?

[robwallace]

Right now it sounds like you need to create different schedules/run times for different sets of equipment.   That way each set of equipment will kick off at the right interval, but offset to solve your problem. Ben if you contact me at rob dot wallace at servicenow.com I may be able to help you a little more.

[matthew_strecke]

Has this question been answered? I have been looking into using planned maintenance and everything was straight forward. How will I know a planned maintenance has run or to start them to run. I even attached a schedule template to the planned maintenance I created. The only way I got it to run was by clicking run on demand and this just updates the next run time. How can I tell that something ran? For example, if I'm in a PROD environment are notifications sent out based on the lead time or based on completion?

[benbaldwin]

The question wasn't answered on here, but I did find the answer. To schedule the initial run of a maintenance schedule select the Run On Demand link. When the popup appears, uncheck "Run now" and click on the Schedule button. This will let you set the date and time for the first run of that schedule. All other runs after that will be scheduled automatically if the maintenance schedule is set up properly and if there is equipment associated with the maintenance plan. There are several steps to getting planned maintenance set up and if anything is missed it will seem like things aren't working. There was a really good workshop on it at Knowledge 17 that steps you through setting up the templates and schedule. I'm not sure if that's available on here anywhere, but if not I can check to see if I can scan it and send it to you.

You will know that the planned maintenance schedule has fired by looking at the Facilities Requests. You should see an open request that matches what was in the template you associated with the maintenance schedule. Out of the box notifications associated with the Facilities Requests and Tasks are sent out when the requests/tasks are created, so that would be another way to know the maintenance schedule has run successfully.

One thing that I discovered that made me think there was a problem when I was setting this up is the system and user time zone settings. If your ServiceNow instance is configured with one time zone and you are trying to kick off one of the maintenance schedules using Run on Demand and the time zone of the computer you're using is different than the ServiceNow it will appear that Run on Demand isn't working. To correct that, you will have to go to your user record and set the time zone there to match the time zone of your computer.

[Lindsey Parker]

Those last two sentences saved me.   Thank you!