Environmental & Risk Management / Environmental Health & Safety/ Concepts

Scheduling Routine (Concept)

As part of establishing a safety program, a safety officer needs to ensure that required medical monitoring, PPE replacement, and training occur for employees and that these events occur on time. This can be vital for meeting government safety regulations. Safety managers can schedule requirements for individual employees, and for groups of employees based on their position or work category, such as maintenance workers.

A safety officer (or other staff familiar with operations at your site) needs to review company practices, governing regulations, and their company's safety goals in order to establish schedules that ensure all internal and external needs are met. Safety officers then use the tasks of the EH&S Background Data process to set up the schedules for medical monitoring, PPE, and training categories.

There are two options for setting up a requirement's schedule:

Set up a recurring schedule that follows a pattern. For events that need to occur on a particular schedule, such as semi-annual refresher training, annual physicals, bi-annual replacement of PPE, you may wish to establish a recurring schedule. With recurring schedules, you establish a pattern and the system generates schedules for up to 10 years based on the scheduling pattern you define. For example, as part of defining a training category, you might establish that refresher training on cleaning the boiler needs to occur once a year on the first Monday of November. Then, for individual employees or work categories that must take the training, you enter a start date. The system generates the training requirement dates, such as Monday November 5, 2012, Monday November 4, 2013, Monday November 3, 2014, and so on for the next 10 years. For more information on factors contributing to the scheduled dates, see the below discussion.
Do not set up scheduling information. For each requirement for each work category or employee, you can directly enter the date on which the event will occur. Not defining a recurring pattern is useful for one-time events, such as initial training upon hiring, initial distribution of PPE, or incident-related follow-up. For example, new employees may need to take a training course on handling hazardous materials before they can start their job; such training would be scheduled as needed, not on a pre-determined recurring schedule. To set up a one-time event, for example a one-time medical event, you can run the Track Employee Medical Monitoring task, choose an employee, choose a medical monitoring category that does not use a recurring pattern, and enter a date for the medical event to occur. Similarly, for a work category's medical monitoring requirements, you can enter a date, and apply the medical event with this date to all employees in the work category.

Carefully consider your requirements when establishing the schedule patterns. For example, you may want to define schedules so that all medical monitoring for certain work categories occurs on the same date. This way, an employee can devote one day to medical exams and meet all requirements for the year. This approach may enhance employee productivity and eliminate loss of production. For training, on the other hand, you may wish to spread out the requirements throughout the year, so that employees are not overwhelmed by taking all required training at one time.

Understanding Recurring Scheduling Dates

Each requirement that uses recurring scheduling can work with the following possible date options:

Field	Where Completed	Use
System-Defined Limits	User does not complete.	If you do not enter any of the below end date fields, the system schedules yearly occurring events out for 10 years; it schedules events that occur monthly, weekly, and daily for 5 years.
Date Monitoring Date Training Date Put in Use	When scheduling requirements for individual employees or for employees based on work category, the system prompts you to enter these dates.	The date you enter here is the date from which the system generates the schedule. For example, if you enter a date of August 10, 2012 for these fields and the event is to occur every year on January 3, the system will schedule the requirement beginning on January 3, 2013. If the event is to occur monthly on the first of the month, the system will begin the schedule starting on September 1, 2012. Note: The system begins generating recurring scheduled events with the first date including or after the user-entered date that fits the recurrence rules. Therefore, if the start date is 3 October 2014 (Friday) and the recurrence pattern is set as annually on the first Wednesday of the month, the first system-generated entry will be 7 October 2015 (Wednesday). If, after automatically generating recurring assignments, the resulting list does not show a desired initial entry, then a user could either select the last generated record from the list and modify the start date for that record to a desired near-term date (e.g., in the current month) or delete the generated records and start over with an earlier start date in the form. If you know the recurrence pattern definition, the smoothest approach may be to adjust the Date Start backwards to include a date in the current cycle (year or month or week), then use Track Employee Personal Protective Equipment Types to adjust that first generated date to the actual start date. As a general guideline: For monthly patterns, set the start date to 1st of the month. For yearly patterns that are set on a day of the month, set start date to January 1st of the year. For weekly patterns set on one or more days of the week, set start date to the Monday preceding the actual start date. After the application generates all the events, you can then edit the record for the first date to adjust the start date forward as desired. For example, if the start date is 10/13/14 and pattern is every 12 months on the first Monday of month, the first date generated would be 10/5/15. Instead, use start date of 10/1/14, so the first generated date will be 10/6/14 (Monday), then use Track Employee Personal Protective Equipment Types to change the 10/6/14 record to 10/13/14 or whatever date is appropriate.
Date Recurrence Ends	When defining the PPE Types, Medical Monitoring, or Training Program requirements, you will see this field if you have selected that renewal/refresher is required.	If you don't want the system to schedule out for 5 years (or 10 years for annually occurring events), you can complete this field to specify the ending period. For example, suppose an event is to occur yearly on July 1, the Start Date is January 1, 2013, and you complete the Date Recurrence End field with January 1, 2016; the system will not schedule this event for 10 years, but will stop scheduling events July 1, 2015.
End After XX Occurrences	When defining the PPE Types, Medical Monitoring, or Training Programs, you will see this field appears in the Recurring Schedule form.	You can also control when scheduling stops by specifying that the event stop after a specified number of occurrences. For example, you might have a daily requirement that is always active. In this case, you may not want to generate 5 years’ worth of events right away, as it may be hard to manage this over time. Therefore, it would be best to generate a new set of events every quarter (count=90) or yearly (count=365). In this case, you could leave Date Recurrence End empty and use this field to control the generated number of schedules. Suppose that an event is to occur monthly on the first of the month and you enter January 1 as the Start Date and complete this field with 6. The system will generate schedules for Jan 1, Feb 1, March 1, April 1, May 1, and June 1 and then stop the scheduling routine. Suppose you complete both Date Recurrence Ends and this field. End After XX Occurrences takes priority over values in the Date Recurrence Ends field. However, the system does not ignore the Date Recurrence End value; instead, it is used as an upper boundary such that dates are generated until XX occurrences OR until Date End is reached. The system does not generate dates beyond Date End regardless of value of X. This allows the application to have a fixed Date Recurrence End, and to also generate dates as needed to get the next set of X number of dates, without ever worrying about going past the Date Recurrence End.
Work Category Date Start/ Date End	When assigning work categories to employees, you can specify the period that the employee is associated with a particular work category.	If you are scheduling employee requirements by work category using the Work Categories / Track Employee Work Categories task, be aware that you can specify the duration that the employee is assigned to a work category. When the system schedules employees via work category, it checks the Date Start and Date End values and does not schedule requirements outside of this date range. For example, if a work category date range is 1/1/2014 to 1/1/2015 and Date Recurrence End is 1/1/2016, the program will schedule only to 1/1/2015 since it comes before the Date Recurrence End value. Similarly, if you enter 1/1/2013 as a Start Date, the system would ignore this and start scheduling from 1/1/2014. For information on why you might limit an employee's assignment to a work category, see Assign Work Categories to Employees.