Personnel Qualifications & Scheduling
Ensure plant staffing adequacy and compliance
What once was a rather simple task – determining a workers qualifications to hold a particular position and scheduling personnel in a shift rotation – has, through the introduction of increasingly complex regulatory and labor work restraints become a time-consuming and often times frustrating process. This fact is particularly evident with the introduction of new worker fatigue management requirements issued from the US NRC in 10 CFR Part 26, Subpart I, known as the Nuclear Fatigue Rule (NFR).
Many organizations use a collection of loosely-coupled spreadsheets, databases, and manual forms to manage the personnel qualification and scheduling process. This approach leaves wide-open the possibility for mistakes in the scheduling of personnel who are not qualified for the positions to which they are assigned, or overworking personnel beyond the regulatory and/or labor agreement work limits. These oversights can result in costly regulatory fines or labor grievances being filed.
Due to an even greater scope and complexity of applicable personnel, fatigue metrics, analytics, assessments, waivers, reporting and review requirements of the NFR, the traditional methods and tools used to manage nuclear worker fatigue may no longer be adequate.
To better manage this process, eSOMS Personnel Qualifications & Scheduling (PQ&S) has the capability to:
- Setup and configure NFR rule sets for work-hour limits. break periods, and minimum days off taking into account: The group for which workers are performing duties (e.g. Operations, Maintenance, Security...)
- Plant operating status (e.g. Online or Outage)
- Develop, maintain, and track worker requirements and associated position qualifications via direct input or links to external sources (e.g. learning management systems)
- Generate, staff, and validate baseline schedules for all groups from pre-defined watchbill rotations, including time-off
- Analyze schedules for compliance with position qualification requirements and NFR constraints, in both production and "what-if" hypothetical modes
- Record and analyze for compliance deviations from baseline schedules including personnel changes and time-keeping
- Generate call-out lists for replacement/overtime workers incorporating qualification, NFR compliance and labor agreement considerations
- Report for business and compliance purposes including the required annual Fitness for Duty (FFD) summary
eSOMS Personnel Qualifications & Scheduling features:
Qualifications Management – Tools are provided to create and maintain worker requirements and position qualifications. Worker requirements encompass a range of entities that affect a worker's qualification to hold a particular watchbill position. Examples of worker requirements include certifications, licenses, medical examinations, training classes, watch-hours stood, etc. Worker requirements can be combined into complex logical expressions using Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT), and internal functions (e.g. to calculate hours worked, rounds taken, etc.) to form a position qualification. Current information on worker requirements can be maintained with PQ&S or brought in via an automated interface with third-party learning management systems.
Watchbill Management - Watchbills are the required shift complements created for departments and their schedule routines (e.g. 8-hour weekday, 12-hour weekend, etc.). Watchbill rotations (6 crew weekly rotation, 4 crew rotation, short rotations, etc.) are created and extended into the future based upon planned schedule requirements and adjusted to accommodate interruptions (e.g. planned outages). Schedules can also be brought in and analyzed for compliance via an automated interface with third-party personnel scheduling systems.
Schedule Management – The Scheduler analyzes both baseline schedules and deviations from baseline compliance with position qualification and NFR constraints over any specific time-frame. Qualification, work-hour limit, break period, minimum days off violations, along with other scheduling conflicts are identified before-the-fact to allow adjustments to be made to schedules in advance to avoid non-compliance.
A powerful "what-if" feature allows individual schedules to be placed into an off-line hypothesis mode allowing changes to be tested and analyzed without affecting the baseline production data. At the choice of the user, changes in the what-if mode can be discarded or incorporated back into the production schedules.
The Scheduler also manages deviations from the baseline schedules (replacement personnel, additional temporary positions, actual start/stop times, etc.) and allows for fine-tuning and adjustments to be made. This "entry-by-exception" method significantly reduces the amount of data input required to maintain the system. If desired, data can also be brought in and analyzed for compliance via an automated interface with third-party time-keeping systems. A replacement/overtime worker call-out module incorporates qualification, NFR and labor agreement analytics to ensure that deviations from baseline schedules are evaluated for compliance.
Reports – A variety of standard reports are available for personnel (personal schedules, completed shifts, time-off), management (crew/department/site schedules, time-off conflicts, worker availability, overtime, outage, time sheets) and compliance (violations, annual FFD).
Integration and Third-Party Interfaces – PQ&S integrates with eSOMS Configuration Control, Clearances, Operator Rounds, and Narrative Logs to ensure personnel compliance at the point of performance of operations related tasks. Interfaces to third-party systems such as learning management, personnel scheduling, and time-keeping can reduce or eliminate redundant data entry.
