Explaining the Phase-based Process

All maintenance orders of the Reactive Maintenance and Proactive Maintenance order types are processed with additional planning, approval, preparation, scheduling, and execution steps that are also reflected in additional system statuses.

During the Initiation phase, you can create maintenance requests for a technical object such as an equipment or a functional location using the Create Maintenance Request app. You can enter all necessary details to help in screening, processing, planning, and execution of the request. You can also include attachments and links. The app allows you to view open requests of a technical object. Until a maintenance request is submitted, the latest draft is available.

Each maintenance request can be prioritized using one of the two options. You can select a priorityfrom the list or assess priority. The priority assessment is done based on a combination of consequence categories, consequences, and likelihoods. Priorities can be assessed only if prioritization profiles are maintained for a combination of maintenance plant and notification type.

The submitted maintenance request moves to the Screening phase. Here, maintenance requests are screened and accepted.

As a supervisor, you can review all the open maintenance requests in the Screen Maintenance Requests app. If information is insufficient, you can send the request back to the initiator. When the initiator provides information and resubmits the request, you can review the request again.

In the home screen of the app, the maintenance requests are grouped according to their statuses (Open, Accepted, Rejected, Action Required, and Completed). By default, open requests are displayed.

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.

You can submit an order for approval from Manage Maintenance Notifications and Orders app and Change Maintenance Order app.

Maintenance orders are approved through a flexible workflow process in the Manage Workflows for Maintenance Orders app. When you approve an order, baseline cost is set to equal to the planned cost. Approved orders can be released. After you release an order, the order moves to Preparation phase.

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.

The Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets app aids you in effectively managing the maintenance backlog. Once-off or recurrent planning buckets allow you to organize major maintenance events such as a planned shutdown as well as define weekly maintenance windows for recurrent maintenance work.

When the maintenance planning buckets have been created and maintenance orders have been associated with particular planning buckets, the Manage Maintenance Backlog 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.

Once you have submitted a maintenance order for scheduling, and changed the order status to Ready to Schedule (ORSC), this order, with all of its operations, is passed on to the Scheduling phase. During this phase, you dispatch the maintenance order, or the individual order operations and sub-operations, and thereby confirm that they have been scheduled at the right work center and at the right time.

Without Resource Scheduling, you cannot dispatch operations individually, but always dispatch maintenance orders with all their operations. To dispatch maintenance orders, you can either select several maintenance orders in the Find Maintenance Order app, or call individual orders in the Change Maintenance Order app and select Dispatch Operations. Then the system dispatches all operations of the selected orders and passes the operations and the corresponding order headers to the Ready for Execution subphase and the Execution phase.

With an additional license, you can use Resource Scheduling for specific work centers. In the Resource Scheduling apps, users can assign these work centers to themselves. If you use Resource Scheduling for the main work center that is assigned to the order, you can dispatch individual order operations and sub-operations and thereby pass the corresponding orders to the Execution phase.

A prerequisite for this phase is that the operations have been set to status Ready for Execution.

In this phase, a maintenance technician receives all the orders that need to be executed. Generally, the technician executes the PRE (preliminary) and MAIN (main) operations for an order in this phase.

After the technician has performed the maintenance task and sets all the PRE and MAIN operations to Finally Confirmed, the system deselects the Has Open Main Work checkbox in the order header data. The supervisor can now filter the result list in the Find Maintenance Order application to display the orders for review and agrees to the completion of the main work. The supervisor changes the status of the order to Main Work Completed in the Find Maintenance Order application.

The supervisor changes the status of the order to Main Work Completed in the Find Maintenance Order application and the order appears in the post-execution phase. The technician proceeds with the post execution tasks for the order (recording of time spent on post execution operations, preparing malfunction details and failure data, and checking final confirmation of post-execution operations).

Once all pre, main and post maintenance tasks have been executed, the maintenance order is set to Technically Complete (Order) and is thereby passed on to the Completion phase. During this phase, the maintenance planner or financial controller reviews maintenance orders in sub-phase Technically Complete (Order), settles the orders financially, performs all the necessary tasks, and finally changes the corresponding order status to Complete (Business). Thereby, the maintenance order is finally set to the Closed (Order) sub-phase.