Maintenance plans and the dispatch queue

Who this is for: office administrators, contract managers and dispatchers.

What you will learn: how recurring work becomes a queue of occurrences, and how those occurrences become jobs.

Plan, occurrence, job

The plan holds the recurrence, asset, checklist, required skills, lead time and service agreement reference.

Create a plan

1. Go to Maintenance plans → New plan.
2. Choose the customer, branch and asset.
3. Choose the checklist template.
4. Set the recurrence:
   • fixed calendar (for example, every 3 months)
   • meter or usage based, where configured
5. Set the next due date and the lead time.
6. Set the priority and estimated duration.
7. Add instructions for the engineer.
8. Choose an Accountable owner for blocked or overdue follow-up.
9. Select Create.

The system generates occurrences as they come into the lead window. Each plan row shows an Owner and a Generation state. A blocked plan explains whether it is inactive, has no matching assets, or is waiting on an open occurrence; use Assign owner to make the follow-up accountable.

Work the dispatch queue

Open Dispatch queue to see occurrences that are due:

1. Filter to Due, Overdue, Overdue and unscheduled, Missed, or No accountable owner.
2. Open an occurrence and review the asset, checklist, instructions, Exception reason and Owner.
3. Create or assign a job. The worker must still pass the same day-start and vehicle-defect safety gates used by the scheduler, dispatch board and offers.
4. Schedule the job.
5. When the job is complete, close the occurrence with the outcome.

Tip: Keep max_open_occurrences at 1 for safety-critical inspections. It prevents a second occurrence being raised before the first is closed.

Missed and held work

• Missed — the due date passed without completion. The system records a reason and keeps the occurrence open for dispatch.
• On hold — waiting for access, parts or customer approval. Add a reason.
• Cancelled — no longer required. State whether the cancellation closes the obligation.
• Overdue and unscheduled — due date has passed and no job is linked. Assign an owner and schedule or hold it.
• Overdue scheduled — a linked job is past the maintenance due date. The job supervisor owns the follow-up.

Reports show overdue maintenance so a contract manager can act before a customer notices. The system does not auto-dispatch missed work or invent a catch-up policy.

Scheduled commands

The operations team runs:

php artisan maintenance:generate
php artisan maintenance:mark-missed --days=7

maintenance:generate creates due occurrences and prints a warning for active plans that were skipped for a reason other than “not yet inside the lead time”. maintenance:mark-missed flags occurrences that passed their window and records the reason.

A monthly contract review

1. Open Maintenance plans and filter to active.
2. Check every plan has a next due date and a checklist.
3. Open Dispatch queue and clear overdue items.
4. Check required skills against the crew roster.
5. Export the operations report for the customer meeting.

Check your understanding

1. What is the difference between a plan and an occurrence?
2. What does lead time control?
3. Why keep one open occurrence for safety-critical work?

Related: Scheduling and dispatch · Assets and documents