Practical Asset Scheduling to Maintain Compliance with PCS - Virtual Brew 08/21/25

In this Virtual Brew, Senior Product Manager David Gautier shares, how to set up smart, automated inspection schedules using PCS: 

✅ Use PCS’s scheduling engine to stay compliant

✅ Set up flexible schedules that match your workflow

✅ Leverage dynamic rules to calculate due dates automatically

Watch the webinar at your convenience.

Transcript

Introduction and Agenda

[Presenter]
Nice to be back with you again. Today we’re going to talk about scheduling in PCS — there’s a lot to discuss, so we’ll dive right in. First, we’ll cover the basics of scheduling, including scheduling facility types — you’ll hear me say that word a lot — what they are, what they do, and why they’re important. We’ll walk through all the configurable scheduling parameters that influence your due dates, and talk about the practicality of how your schedules and delinquent dates overlap. Then we’ll wrap up by digging into some deeper customization options and a variety of ways to configure your schedules efficiently.

Scheduling Basics

The scheduling engine in PCS is a common element across the whole platform — any module you’re using is going to have scheduling out of the box, except for indirect survey, since ECDA-type inspection schedules aren’t as regimented.

We bake the standard regulations into those schedules for every facility type — test points are annual by default, rectifiers and critical bonds are bimonthly, atmospherics are on a three-year cycle, and so forth. So just by adding test points to the test points tab and rectifiers to the rectifiers tab, PCS can properly schedule your inspections, assuming they’re being measured against the standard requirements. It’s as easy as that.

In this example, the default for atmospherics is three years, and with my configuration, every time I add an atmospheric test location, it inherits settings from the main template — we call these main templates scheduling facility types. Every facility in PCS always inherits schedule settings from its corresponding template, from the highest level down — we’ll talk about how to manipulate that later. Just know that correctly categorizing your facilities directly impacts your schedules, which directly impacts your delinquent dates.

Schedules vs. Delinquencies

Let’s talk about the difference between schedules and delinquencies. Schedules are meant to help you optimize the time of year you should be gathering inspections — say, reading these locations in April so you’re not bunching everything up toward the end of the year. You might already do this — you always go to these locations in a certain month, and that’s worked for 10 years, which is great, you can keep doing that. But if you configure PCS settings to align with those schedules, you get an extra layer of guardrails: a heads-up that you might have missed a couple of assets that were supposed to be read in April, so you can go back and get them before hitting your delinquent date.

So, schedules optimize when you should do things. Delinquencies are your drop-dead compliance due dates — the schedule configurations are part of the metadata used to calculate your delinquent dates. It’s important that your scheduling facility types are configured correctly, or you might mistakenly see facilities showing as delinquent when they’re actually not.

Three Methods for Calculating Due Dates

Digging deeper into scheduling: there are three different methods for how scheduling due dates are calculated — not delinquent due dates, which are always based on your last inspection, but scheduling due dates, which optimize when you should go do things. The three methods are Targets, Last Survey, and X Years, Y%.

Targets are straightforward — you go in and specify a group of assets to do in a specific month and year. For a multi-year inspection like atmospherics, you might assign year one, year two, or year three. It lets you granularly spread your assets across months so you can balance your workload rather than doing everything in one month. It takes a bit longer to set up, since you have to manually define which assets are due in which months, but it’s worth it for keeping your workload balanced.

Last Survey Method

Last Survey is commonly used because it’s really easy to set up — it calculates your schedule dates based on your last inspection, incorporating your months-between-survey setting, and it also accounts for calendar violations. It doesn’t just say “my last inspection was this month, so I don’t need another until next year” — it still incorporates the required number of inspections per year. It’s popular because it’s easy: go into Edit Schedule Settings, find your scheduling facility type, click the due date calculation method, select Last Survey, and you’re off to the races.

The challenge with Last Survey is that it doesn’t keep you optimized — if you’re continually taking inspections during your grace period, your annual inspections slide later every year. Take it one month late every year, and eventually all your inspections bunch up in December, since you have to have that inspection within the calendar year. It doesn’t pull inspections back into the month they should be taken, so it doesn’t really optimize workload, but it does give you a good, quick read on when you should go do things to stay compliant.

X Years, Y% Method

The last option, X Years, Y%, is mostly related to isolated services — commonly a 10-year survey where you sample 10% of your assets each year through random sampling, and after 10 years, you’ve inspected them all. You can change the years and percentages — for example, 11% would finish a year early, or you could stretch it to more years. This isn’t commonly used outside of isolated services and gas distribution environments, but the option is there if you need it.

Inspection Timing Settings

Every scheduling facility type lets you granularly control the time between surveys, the grace period, and the required number of inspections per year. These settings translate into your “12 months, not to exceed 15, or the calendar year, whichever comes first” rule — that’s what ties schedules and delinquencies together, since these settings are tied directly to your delinquent dates. You can configure them to match your O&M plan.

Time between surveys is simple — it determines how long between inspections, configured in months or years. For example, a standard annual test point configuration is 12 months, meaning one inspection every 12 months, every year.

Grace periods define how long after your due date you have before an inspection becomes delinquent — your drop-dead compliance due date. If your grace period would extend into the next calendar year, since you still need an inspection each calendar year, there’s another setting for the required number of inspections per calendar year. PCS’s scheduling engine handles all the logic — you put in the months, the grace period, and inspections per year, and the code handles the “not to exceed 15 months, or whichever comes first” calculation. You don’t have to think about that at all. Even if you don’t use scheduling to optimize when you do inspections, these settings still apply to delinquent dates, so make sure they’re aligned with your O&M plan so your delinquent dates are accurate.

How Schedules and Delinquencies Overlap

Delinquent dates come straight from your schedule settings — every facility in PCS always has a scheduling facility type so we can determine the delinquent date. But delinquent dates don’t focus on whether you’re doing things on time; they only focus on that drop-dead compliance due date, factoring in your last inspection plus all the settings we’ve covered.

Beyond time between surveys, grace period, and inspections per year, delinquent dates also factor in a few additional fields: installation date, the surveyed status of your last inspection, and facility active.

Installation date is pretty self-explanatory — an optional field that logs when a facility was installed in the field; we’ll cover how that impacts delinquencies shortly.

Surveyed status is how we determine whether a previous inspection actually counts as complete in PCS. If you use FDC, you’re familiar with this — the tri-state, multicolor coding on the map, site list, and facility pages, where green means surveyed (a green box around the facility type with a check), blue means visited but not completed (you went there and gathered something, but didn’t complete everything needed), and white means not yet visited.

For inspections to count toward your scheduling requirements — and in turn your delinquency requirements — they have to be considered surveyed. There’s a whole string of configurations that go deep into surveyed status that I won’t cover in detail here, since it could be its own presentation, but a PCS admin can choose at the field level which fields count toward surveyed status, turning them on or off for everyone, and can also control whether any of those fields count, or whether every field on an inspection is required to be considered surveyed. There’s a lot of literature on this on our support site.

The last additional field is facility active — pretty straightforward: you only want to measure currently active facilities against delinquencies, so you don’t want a report showing you missed a bunch of inspections when you’ve actually abandoned those sites. Make sure you’re updating facility active status.

Delinquency Classifications

All of these settings — schedule settings, installation date, inspection date, surveyed status, facility active — determine your delinquent status, which shows up in a field called delinquent notes on the delinquency report. There are three classifications for delinquencies.

Interval violation means you went over your 15 months — the rule is 12 months, not to exceed 15; if you take an inspection in the 16th month, you were out of compliance for a month. Calendar violation means you went over the calendar year — you have to have one inspection per year, so if you miss the calendar year, that’s a calendar violation. The system determines whichever of those two comes first, so you don’t have to think about it.

The last one relates to installation date — you might see “no last inspection” on your delinquency report, which usually just means the facility is newly added to PCS, and the report doesn’t know how to treat it, since delinquent dates are based on last inspection, and there’s no baseline yet for when to start calculating. If you see “no last inspection,” you probably just need to go in and enter the installation date, which sets the timer — essentially treating it like a previous inspection — so the system can calculate delinquent dates correctly.

Customizing Schedules: Inheritance and Overrides

Now let’s talk about what happens if your assets don’t follow standard regulations — what customization options do you have? This is super common, since we’re audited not against standard regulations, but against our own O&M plan, and PCS is designed to match your O&M.

A key concept here: all scheduling changes start at the global level and cascade down to every facility — we call this inheritance. It’s an important concept, since manipulating inheritance is how you can quickly and efficiently make large-scale scheduling changes — settings are always applied top-down.

If you need to deviate from a global setting, you put in an override. Overrides happen at lower levels and stop inheritance from going any further — the override becomes the new setting for any downstream assets from that point. You can do this a few different ways: through hierarchy settings, or by building custom scheduling facility types with auto select expressions, which sounds complex but really isn’t — and you’re already familiar with the concept, even if you don’t realize it.

Example: Onshore vs. Offshore Atmospherics

Atmospherics are read every three years by default, but that’s typically for onshore atmospherics — offshore atmospherics are typically read every year. You can build custom scheduling facility types in PCS — one for onshore atmospherics, one for offshore — each with different months-between-survey settings, and use a property in PCS so the system can programmatically determine whether an asset is onshore or offshore, and apply the right months-between-survey setting, which impacts the delinquent date.
Manipulating Schedules via Hierarchy

The most basic way to do this is through your hierarchy. On the far left, you’ll see your standard hierarchy — at the very top, American Innovations has a down arrow, meaning there’s an override in place at a lower level. Following it down to the next highlighted box, Transmission Systems is bolded — when a hierarchy element is bolded in the hierarchy-level override screen, that means there’s an override in place at that level. On the right, in the table of scheduling facility types, the bolded settings show you exactly what the override is.

If your hierarchy is organized to let you delineate your assets, you can pick a hierarchy level and manipulate time between surveys, grace period, early survey limit, required inspections per calendar year, and so on — the exact same settings applied at the global level, just changing where that setting applies and letting it cascade down to all the assets in that folder. This can be done at any hierarchy level, even down to the individual facility, but I really recommend not doing it at the facility level — since global settings stop at overrides, if you need to make broader changes later, you’d have to undo all those individual overrides first. The lower you place your overrides, the more work it takes to undo them, so always try to set overrides at the highest reasonable level, so future changes stay easy.

Manipulating Schedules via Auto Select Expressions

The next kind of override is more programmatic — auto select expressions, which happen more automatically rather than manually choosing hierarchy levels. You’re already familiar with this concept: think about critical bonds versus non-critical bonds — both are foreign bonds in PCS, and PCS looks at the critical bond checkbox field. If it’s checked, it’s critical, and time between surveys is 2 months; if unchecked, it’s annual, read every 12 months. That already feeds into delinquencies today.

You can build your own custom scheduling facility types for cases where the same PCS asset type needs different scheduling — like onshore versus offshore atmospherics. They’re all atmospherics, but with different months-between-survey settings, so you use a scheduling facility type with an auto select expression — essentially a filter on a PCS field — and let the system determine the months-between-survey setting for you.

Best Practices

Set your hierarchy overrides sparingly — global settings and inheritance apply top-down, and the more overrides you have at lower levels, the longer it takes to undo them if you need to make changes.

Use auto select expressions maximally — let the system handle the nuance rather than manually going through and defining things yourself; figure out a filter that draws the line between your assets.

Finally, turn off unused scheduling facility types. For example, if you have three scheduling facility types related to bonds, and the bottom two — periodic bond critical, and annual bond non-critical — already cover every case your bond could fall into (critical or non-critical, bimonthly or annual), you don’t need the third, out-of-the-box annual bond type, since it’s already covered by non-critical bonds. Just change that type’s “selected” setting from yes to no, so the system doesn’t try to schedule an additional, redundant annual inspection.

Closing

That’s a lot of content — that’s it, thank you all so much for attending.