Using Maintenance Plans

• Maintenance Plan

  Designed to automatically produce call objects such as maintenance orders in certain intervals (single cycle or strategy). Depends heavily on regular scheduling (see next lesson).

• Maintenance Item

  The part of the maintenance plan which contains the technical object, the planning data and and the task list.

To minimize downtimes and maintenance costs, the technical systems in a company are inspected and maintained regularly. You want to understand the plans that can help you manage this maintenance. For this reason, you need to understand single cycle plans (time based) and strategy plans (time based).

Single cycle plans are used to manage the maintenance of machines and operational systems, which are always inspected and/or maintained in the same way at fixed intervals.

In this plan, the same activity is executed at regular intervals.

Some examples of a single cycle plans are as follows:

• Annual inspection of fire extinguishers

• Technical inspection every two years

• Inspection of boilers every six years, as per pressure vessel regulations

The maintenance plan is composed of scheduling data and maintenance items, and is used for automatically generating maintenance call objects such as order, notification, and service entry sheet.

The scheduling data contains the following information:

• Cycle or maintenance intervals

• Scheduling parameters for fine-tuning scheduling

• List of planned dates and call dates

A maintenance item contains the following information:

• Planning data (for example, maintenance planning plant, maintenance planner group, order type, and so on)

• Reference object

• Task list (optional)

A maintenance plan can have one or more maintenance items. For example, in pump maintenance, one maintenance item refers to the pump transmission with the corresponding task list. Another maintenance item refers to the pump motor with the corresponding task list.

A task list is assigned to a maintenance item. The system calculates the times when the maintenance plan is scheduled.

In the case of a single cycle plan, the complete task list is always due.

Business Process: Strategy plans are used when activities that are due at different intervals are graded.

For example, the strategy plan can be used to manage maintenance activities of a car in the following ways:

• Check fan belt every 12 months

• Change fan belt every 24 months

• Check air filter every 6 months

• Change air filter every 12 months

Maintenance strategy:

• Maintenance Packages

• Scheduling indicator

• Default values

The maintenance strategy consists of several maintenance packages and represents the scheduling rule for preventive maintenance. You can assign maintenance strategies to task lists. The scheduling indicator determines the scheduling type.

Some examples of scheduling indicators are as follows:

• Time-based using key date

• Time-based according to factory calendar

• Performance-based

You can assign maintenance packages to a maintenance strategy. The packages for a strategy can have different cycle units (for example, month or year), but they must always have the same dimension (for example, time).

The important parameters for a maintenance package are as follows:

• Package number

• Description

• Cycle length

• Unit of measurement

• Hierarchy

If two packages are due on the same date, the hierarchy determines which package is performed first.

• Offset

  The offset determines the first due date for a package.

• Initial or subsequent buffer

  The initial or subsequent buffer specifies to what extent the intended start and end dates for a package can vary.

Task lists can be created for use in preventive maintenance. To prepare task lists for use in strategy plans, the following steps are required:

• Assign a maintenance strategy in the task list header.

• Assign packages to different operations in the task list.

  This defines the frequency with which the operations have to be executed.

You assign a maintenance strategy to a strategy-based maintenance plan.

Only a task list that has the same maintenance strategy as the maintenance plan can be assigned to a strategy-based maintenance plan.

As an alternative to working in SAP Fiori Launchpad you can use the following transactions.

For the On Premise edition they are available via SAP GUI for Windows.

In addition, every transaction also has a SAP GUI for HTML version.

Transactions for Maintenance Plans:

• IP41 - Create Single Cycle Plan 
• IP42 - Create Strategy Plan 
• IP02 - Change Maintenance Plan
• IP03 - Display Maintenance Plan
• IP15 - List Editing Change Maintenance Plan
• IP16 - List Editing Display Maintenance Plan
• IP17 - List Editing Change Maintenance Item
• IP18 - List Editing Display Maintenance Item