Long-term planning allows you to use Schedule Optimization to plan work orders not just in the usual scheduling horizon period of two to four weeks but also far into the future. With long-term planning, you can auto-schedule long-term work orders. The horizon of scheduling is up to 18 months.

For example, you can use long-term planning to schedule preventive maintenance work orders. Preventive maintenance work orders are created in advance, sometimes even by 18 months. This helps generate a predictable maintenance cycle and provides visibility of the maintenance plan. For example, a car seller needs to generate periodical servicing jobs for the cars they sell. They generate work orders for the whole year at the beginning of the year and share the servicing schedule with their customers.

LTP mode of scheduling attempts to schedule the work orders with the maximum possible constraints. However, as it is not a fully optimized scheduling, all the soft constraints might not be fulfilled, depending on the data distribution. As the horizon reaches closer, you can either review the technician calendar manually or perform full optimization.

For more information about setting up LTP dispatch processes, see Working with Long-Term Planning.