Maintenance Reminders and Squawks

This article will explain the relationships between reminders/squawks and work items within Maintenance Hub.

Overview

Maintenance Reminders are scheduled maintenance that needs to occur to an aircraft routinely. Squawks are unscheduled maintenance that needs to occur to an aircraft that is ad hoc or unplanned. Both produce Work Items which are discrete unit of work to be completed by the maintenance shop. Because reminders and squawks are visible to non-maintenance personnel such as pilots and students, they are kept as separate objects in the system.

Because these are different concepts for different users of Flight Schedule Pro, there are some rules to keep in mind:

• A reminder or squawk can never be linked to more than one work item
• A work item can never be linked to more than one reminder or squawk
• Only unlinked reminders or squawks are available to link to  a work item
• Only unlinked work items are available to link to a reminder or squawk
• Reminders and squawks can't be linked to work items for a different aircraft or no aircraft
• Links can be added or removed at any time by users with the "Manage Work Item Links" permission
• Reminders must be resolved before they are able to be linked to another work item

Maintenance Reminders

Reminders serve as a way to block dispatch of an aircraft when maintenance comes due. Since the introduction of Maintenance Reminder Templates, it is best to create these on a make/model basis. And now with the capabilities of Maintenance Hub, you can create work item templates and attach them to your reminders. This allows you to specify the work to be done when the reminder comes due, and allows you to template your work logs such that they will be consistent across work orders.

A reminder doesn't get directly added to a work order. Instead, a work item gets created that represents said reminder. You can add multiple work item templates to a reminder, and each one will get created on your work order, but only one represents the actual reminder itself. By doing this, it ensures you can add extra work items you want created to your reminder, but still have the flexibility to remove them from your work order while still indicating the reminder is 'done'. Here is a conceptual example.

In this example, you can see that the reminder for a "Cessna 152 100hr/Annual Inspection" includes 3 work items:

1. Cessna 152 100hr/Annual Inspection(Default - more on this below)
2. Cessna 152 AD 2011-10-09 Seat Track
3. Cessna 152 Oil Change

It was built this way since all three work items needs to be completed every 100hrs of operation, and because each represents a discrete unit of work to be completed and tracked. Don't forget you can add attachments and work logs to each, latter of which will then become logbooks.

Anytime this reminder is added to a work order, it will generate three work items that will automatically get added to the work order. Those work items will then include any work logs and attachments as built on the reminder.

Default Work Item

In order to link work being performed in maintenance back to the reminder, the first work item on the reminder is considered the Default. You can tell this by the link icon and reminder text on the first item in the list. You can also hover on the text for more information.

Using our example above, the "Cessna 152 100hr/Annual Inspection" is the default work item. When this reminder gets added to a work order, this work item will automatically get linked back to the reminder itself, and will serve as thede factowork item that represents the reminder. The other two work items ("Cessna 152 AD 2011-10-09 Seat Track" and "Cessna 152 Oil Change") still get added to the work order, but remain unlinked. This gives you the flexibility to then add other work to your work order, or remove the "Cessna 152 AD 2011-10-09 Seat Track" and "Cessna 152 Oil Change" while still keeping the reminder linked. If you delete the "Cessna 152 100hr/Annual Inspection" work item, or unlink it from the reminder, the reminder will no longer be associated to your work order.

Squawks

Squawks behave in much the same way as reminders, but anytime a squawk gets added to a work order, a single work item will get created of type Squawk and then be linked to the squawk itself. 

The linked work item behaves identically to the default work item described above, since a squawk will never produce more than one work item. You can can still delete the linked work item, or unlink the squawk if need be.