Key Terms used in this lesson
Plant
Describes the organizational unit where technical objects are located and where planning tasks are performed.
Work Center
Describes the organizational unit which is either responsible for or performs maintenance activities.
Business Partner
Unique identification of a person (or group of persons); connected to a personnel number and a SAP user.
Your company wants to implement Asset Management with SAP S/4HANA. Depending on the structure of your company, maintenance planning is either plant-based (decentralized) or cross-plant (centralized). After you have clarified the structure of your organization, you want to make the necessary additions to the configuration of your SAP system.
- Step 1:
Plant Maintenance is often only implemented after other components, such as Financial Accounting (FI), Controlling (CO), or Materials Management (MM) have been implemented. This means that the company structure is for the most part predefined in the system. Now, the existing structure must be analyzed from a Plant Maintenance perspective and extended to include the maintenance-specific parts.
- Step 2:
After an in-depth analysis, the organizational units relevant for Plant Maintenance are defined in the system. Maintenance plants (which, usually, already exist as logistical plants) and maintenance planning plants (planning plants for short) are defined in the company structure.
- Step 3:
In this step, the maintenance planner groups are assigned to planning plants, and maintenance work centers are assigned to maintenance plants.
Organizational Levels
The organizational levels are structured as follows:
- Client
The Client is the highest-level element of all the organizational units. It corresponds to a corporate group with several subsidiaries. Within a client, the system always accesses the same database.
- Controlling Area
From the Controlling perspective, one or several company codes are assigned to a Controlling Area to have a common Controlling/Management Accounting over several subsidiaries.
- Company Codes
The subsidiaries, with their own financial statements and balance sheets, are defined as Company Codes.
- Plant
The Plant at which the operational systems of a company are installed is called the maintenance plant.
- Planning Plant
If maintenance work is planned at this plant, the maintenance plant is also the maintenance planning plant. Locations subdivide a maintenance plant according to location-based criteria, such as site, buildings, and coordinates. A maintenance plant can also be subdivided into plant sections based on responsibility for production. The person responsible for the plant section is the contact person who coordinates production and maintenance (the plant engineer).
A Maintenance Planning Plant (Planning Plant for short) is the organizational unit in which maintenance requirements are planned. These requirements can either come from your own plant or from another maintenance plant assigned to this maintenance planning plant. The planners within a maintenance planning plant are defined by maintenance planner groups.
- Maintenance Work Centers
The units of capacity in plant maintenance are managed as Maintenance Work Centers. Maintenance work centers are assigned to the respective maintenance plant as workshops.
- Organizational Unit
The Organizational Unit (Org Unit) is one of the building blocks in HR (Human Resources) to build up an organizational structure. An organizational unit can be assigned to a maintenance work center. This allows you to specify different teams both from a logistical and an HR perspective.
- Personnel Number
The Personnel Number is the business object used in HR to describe an employee with all its different data.
- Business Partner
The Business Partner in SAP S/4HANA is the mandatory approach to create master data such as persons, groups of persons and organizations. Examples are customer, vendor, personnel number, and so on. Each personnel number has a mandatory business partner assigned.
- SAP User
To log on to an SAP system, every user needs an SAP User, which holds the different logon parameters, the roles combined with access rights, and so on. The SAP User is coupled with the personnel number (and the business partner). So, when a user logs on to an SAP S/4HANA system, all different perspectives and data views of this user are covered.
Cross-Plant Maintenance
- Plant-specific planning:
A Maintenance plant is also known as a Maintenance planning plant.
In most organizational structures, maintenance measures are planned in the same plant where the maintenance requirement occurs. The maintenance orders are executed by workshops from the same plant, and the spare parts are stored in the same plant (for example, plant 1000).
- Cross-plant planning:
Multiple maintenance plants are assigned to a planning plant. For example, in a plant (for example, plant 1200) needs for maintenance because a technical system there requires maintenance (maintenance plant). All further functions (maintenance planning, order execution, and spare parts storage) are however, the responsibility of another plant.
Other options are also possible. The planning of a plant's maintenance measures (for example, plant 1300) and the spare parts procurement take place in another plant (plant 1000). However, the tasks are performed by workshops that are available locally.
Maintenance Work Centers
A work center is an organizational unit where work can be carried out. Examples for work centers are:
- A machine
- A group of machines
- A person
- A group of people
In plant maintenance, work centers are used in Asset Management as follows:
- Responsible work center in the master record of equipment and functional location
- Responsible work center in a maintenance item
- Responsible work center in the header of a task list
- Executing work center in the operations of a task list
- Responsible work center in the order header
- Executing work center in the operations of an order
Work centers belong to the master data and provide the capacity that is required to perform a task.
Work Center - Content
- Cost center
- Qualifications
- Positions
- People
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