Operational plan represents the productive work plan for an equipment structure. It mainly consists of a time schedule of operations that are planned called operational plan items. Operational plan items can be defined manually or can be imported from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Those operational plan items called manual plan items. Project activities also act as operational plan items as it also represent productive work. Therefore it is possible to include project activities also into operational plan and those are called reference plan items.
Operational Plans are used to schedule work orders and PM actions using Maintenance Planning Board. Maintenance Planning Board schedules "scheduling obstructive" work orders and PM actions outside of operational activities where the object is out of operation.
An Operational Plan could be loaded to MPB, if the site for which you have started Maintenance Planning Board is connected to the valid site list.
Manual operational plan item represents operational activity for a object structure. It indicates the operation start time and end time. It also indicate whether that time period can be considered as a Maintenance Window or not. This means that during the indicated time slot, any type of maintenance work can be scheduled and performed. Operational plan item can also have a connection to a Operational Mode. This indicate that ,any functional or equipment object in the connected object structure that has the same Operational Mode is in the operational critical path meaning that the object is in operation ( or in other words being used to perform the operational plan item indicated productive work) when the operational plan item is executed. Using combination of operational plan item information, its operational mode and functional or equipment object operational mode, the Maintenance Planning Board decide when the object is available for maintenance. This is called "Object Accessibility" .The object accessibility is a necessary requirement for MPB to schedule obstructive maintenance work.
Reference operational plan items used to represent collection of activities from a project. User can use wild card characters to indicate multiple project activities. When Maintenance Planning Board is started, it indicate each reference operational activity. But unlike manual operational plan items, the reference operational plans can not be connected to operational modes and can not be defined as maintenance window within IFS Enterprise Explorer client. Therefore Maintenance Planning Board does not decide object accessibility based on reference operational plan items. This is by the way possible inside Maintenance Planning Board when its used in simulation mode.