Our planners had a scenario recently where 2 people were in a WO trying to Prepare it as they didn’t know they were both in there which caused some confusion and double up of planner time.
The team feels that having to change each WO to “Under Preparation” to indicate its being prepared, and then to “Released” once ready is too much manual work and wanted to know whether an automatic lock/unlock was possible to eliminate the confusion and double up and reduce some manual clicking (we do have a fair few PMs and fault reports that generate daily).
Ok, so maybe just utilise the ‘Prepare By’ field. From the PMs that can be set automatically if you know who is preparing it up front and for the rest just introduce a process whereby the users have to set this value to indicate that it’s under preparation. If you want to make it a one-click (two really) process you could add a custom menu e.g. ‘Take Ownership’/’Start Planning’ which automatically sets the Prepared By to the user executing it (and possibly sets it to Under Preparation just to indicate to others that it’s actually ‘taken’).
Then tell the users that if ‘Prepare By’ is blank, it’s fair game. If they are working from an overview to select WOs to prepare, add Conditional Formatting to highlight lines where ‘Prepared By’ is blank in green or something.
I think adding a true lock will just cause more work for everyone and you’ll end up turning it off within a couple of weeks anyway.