I like nested job plans but I can understand why they don't want to see child work orders for them. I'm assuming these generic tasks need to be completed before any of the actual work is started? For example, to review the hazards/precautions, verify they're qualified to perform the work, that the necessary permits exist, etc. Is there anything from the generic job plan we'd use beside the tasks? I am also assuming these generic job plans would not have resource requirements (materials, labor, tools, etc.) defined on the job plan nor would those resources need to be captured on execution of the work so I'm thinking the use case might just be tasks.
If you write something custom to bring these in as work order tasks and want to use traditional job plans as well, you're going to have to write the logic to handle taskid to avoid conflicts. For example, let's say they have 10 tasks for generic job plan 1 and the actual job plan 2 starts with a taskid of 10. Even if the generic job plan incremented the taskid by 1 instead of 10 you would have a conflict on task 10. Because you can't apply a job plan when tasks exist, you'd have to apply the functional job plan first and then add in your tasks after & renumber where needed. It's technically doable, but if you're not needing capabilities like tracking resources on them it seems counter-productive to me. And potentially adds a lot of data to the WORKORDER table to store it.
I've seen customers use a variety of mechanisms for tracking this sort of stuff. For example, some customers are using Inspections for tracking a checklist before a user can start the work. Others have built custom objects for having the user sign off on before starting work. It really all depends on their use case what makes the most sense.
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Steven Shull
IBM
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