Planning, Approval and Preparation

The Planning phase begins when a maintenance request is accepted. The accepted maintenance request is now known as a maintenance notification. As a Maintenance Planner, you can now create and plan orders.

When you create an order, the order is in the phase Planning and subphase In Planning (Order). Depending upon the configuration of the order type (Activate Workflow for Order Type), an order needs a cost approval. An order can be released without an approval if the order type is not configured for workflow. If the workflow is configured for the order type, the order goes through the workflow steps for approval. If the workflow is configured for automatic approval, then the order is approved immediately. If workflow is set up for manual approval, it will move to the approver's inbox.

The submitted order moves to My Inbox app. When an order is submitted for approval, the phase and subphase of the order are Approval and Submitted for Approval (Order) respectively. If the order is approved, then the subphase of the order is Approved (Order). If the order is rejected, then the subphase is Rejected (Order).

You can release the accepted maintenance orders for preparation. You can edit a rejected maintenance order and submit it for approval. It moves to the Approval Phase.

When you create a maintenance order based on an accepted request - using App Manage Maintenance Notifications and Orders - you can leverage machine learning capabilities of SAP AI Services to find suitable orders from which you can copy information based on historical data in your system. Within the Create Order option you will find the Get Recommendations button. This feature is available as of SAP S/4HANA 2025 FPS1.

By analyzing the description as well as other important attributes of the selected notification and its reference object, the machine learning algorithm is able to identify and recommend orders that have been created for similar notifications in the past.

Prerequisites

• A SAP BTP subaccount with a Cloud Foundry space must be available

• The Personalized Recommendation service must be enabled

  (using the Intelligent Scenario Management / Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM)

• A Machine Learning Model must be trained and activated

If you need additional information while planning a maintenance order, you can create dedicated scoping orders in the Manage Maintenance Orders app as of SAP S/4HANA 2025 FPS01. Scoping orders allow you to delegate the required information-gathering activities to a technician who may visit the site or perform remote analysis as needed and record the effort spent on this task.

To create a scoping order, you add an operation with the execution stage SCOPE to the order you are planning. Once you save the order, the system generates a scoping order for this operation. The scoping order is linked to the operation in the same way as a follow-on order. You then plan, release, and dispatch the scoping order for execution. The responsible technician gathers the required information and communicates the findings to you. You update the main order with the relevant information. The technician posts a final time confirmation for the scoping tasks. Once the scoping order has been marked as technically completed, you can continue to process the main order according to the order type.

Taking these parameters into account, the system ensures that the required stock components are assigned to the maintenance orders with the highest priority and urgency.

If you only select the Reset Availability Data checkbox, the system sets all committed material quantities to 0. You can use this option to free up material availability by removing all committed stock from a set of maintenance orders.

When you create or change a maintenance order, you can manually determine that committed quantities of individual components should not be cleared and reassigned during a material availability check by selecting the Keep Commitment checkbox in the material list. In this case, available quantities will only be assigned to the respective maintenance order but cannot be removed by the ATP check.

If you select the Reset Availability Data checkbox together with the Execute Availability Check checkbox, the system checks the reservations that have been created for the maintenance orders and clears all committed material quantities. In a second step, the system reassigns the available stock material to the maintenance orders taking the following parameters into account:

• The final due date
• The priority
• The ABC indicator
• The date and time when the order was created

Once an order is approved for execution and released, it is set to In Preparation and passed to the Preparation phase. In this phase, you as a maintenance planner divide the maintenance effort into manageable groups, level out the workload over several weeks, determine the concrete time period for the requested maintenance work, and check the availability of all the resources, spare parts and services needed.

You can create maintenance planning buckets and define the planning bucket scope. This scope includes a specific time period, such as a concrete calendar week, and other important attributes, such as the maintenance planning plant or the main work center. Based on this scope, the system groups maintenance orders and associates them with the corresponding planning buckets. If the scheduled start and end dates of an order fulfill the selection criteria of an individual bucket, this order is associated with this particular bucket.

In general, the terms revision and maintenance event both refer to a period of time during which several maintenance activities need to be planned and executed together on one or more technical objects. In some cases, it may be necessary to temporarily shut down a technical object so that service or maintenance work can be performed.

To facilitate the planning of the maintenance activities, you can create an object called a revision or maintenance event and, for example, assign maintenance orders to it.

• The term Revision is used if you create and manage this object in SAP GUI.
• The term Maintenance Event is used if you create and manage this object in the SAP Fiori app Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets.

When you create a maintenance event using the Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets app, you need to select a Maintenance Event Type. The available maintenance event types correspond to Revision Types that have to be defined in Customizing. There are three maintenance event types available:

• WPS-Controlled (Maintenance Event Builder)
• Not WPS-Controlled
• Planning Bucket

Examples of how orders can be assigned to maintenance events:

• Via app Find Maintenance Orders - Change Scheduling

• Via app Maintenance Scheduling Board (Resource Scheduling) - Right-click the order symbol, then Assign Event

When you create a maintenance event, you can assign maintenance orders and maintenance notifications to the event as of SAP S/4HANA 2025 FPS1. The available options depend on the app version you use. The following features are available:

• Assignment of Execution Objects: Execution Objects (i.e. Maintenance orders and notifications) can be assigned directly to a maintenance event within the relevant planning bucket.

• Date Alignment: When assigning an order or notification to an event, you can align its execution dates with the event dates. The system copies the event dates to the header and adjusts them based on operation duration, scheduling constraints, and work center capacity.

• Visibility of Assignments: Assigned orders and notifications appear on the Event Planning and Execution Objects tab of the corresponding planning bucket. Assigned orders are also visible in the maintenance backlog of the planning bucket.

• Scope Compliance Required: Only orders and notifications that fully match all criteria defined in the planning bucket scope can be assigned to a maintenance event. Scope attributes can be adjusted in the planning bucket if needed.

• Exclusive Assignment: An assigned order or notification is locked to its current event — it cannot be reassigned to another event unless it is explicitly removed (unassigned) from the current one first.

When the maintenance planning buckets have been created and maintenance orders have been associated with particular planning buckets, the Maintenance Backlog Overview app provides a list of all the maintenance orders in a specific planning bucket. Here, you can view important order details, such as the order status, the order priority, and the final due date.

To display information on the cards in the Maintenance Backlog Overview app, you need to select a series of operational planning buckets and indicate how many past and future planning buckets you want to view.

To facilitate the planning bucket selection, the Planning Bucket Template filter has been renamed to Reference Planning Bucket. In addition, the value help now only shows reference planning buckets rather than both reference planning buckets and individual planning buckets.

Based on the selected reference planning bucket, the system identifies the individual planning bucket that is valid for the current date and displays information about this planning bucket and the selected planning buckets in the past and in the future.

The Rework Orders card as part of the Maintenance Backlog Overview enables you to detect repetitive maintenance work during a given period of time. This helps you to avoid issues that could result in equipment failure. In general, if an order has been technically completed and another order of the same order type is created for the same technical object within a specified period, this new order can be considered as a rework order, depending on how you have configured the rework analysis.

Once you are confident that all the required resources will be available on the required dates, you can select individual orders in the Manage Maintenance Backlog app and choose Submit for Scheduling. You can also select the relevant orders in the Find Maintenance Order app and change their status to Ready to Schedule or set this status for an individual order in the Change Maintenance Order app. With this action, you pass the corresponding maintenance orders on to the Scheduling phase.