Explaining the Phase Based Maintenance Process

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to explain where maintenance orders are used and describe their purpose along the maintenance processes

Business Background

The whole asset management process can be divided into three steps, of which one is a prerequisite: asset maintenance demand processing. This step is about creating and processing any work request, from classical corrective to condition-based, predictive, or prescriptive maintenance methods. It all starts with a request for maintenance work to be performed, with this, mobile devices such as the SAP Service and Asset Manager can be used, as well as the desktop of the SAP S/4HANA EAM solution to describe the technical faults. SAP Intelligent Asset Management enables you, at this stage, to synchronize notification and order data along the process.

The second step of the maintenance process is maintenance planning. This step aims to plan maintenance activities and find the ideal technician to use the appropriate tools and resources and perform these activities. A full view of asset status, maintenance cost, and breakdown causes can be gained. From a business perspective, the maintenance costs shall be reduced by efficiently using labor, material, equipment, and schedules. Enhanced analysis and monitoring contribute to this goal. Maintenance plans and operations can be classified to simplify the search for certain activities, for example, operations can be classified as pre-, main-, and post-work.

Finally, the planning must be transferred into a successful execution of planned or emergency maintenance tasks. Employees can access, transfer, complete, and manage their assigned work orders at any device, for example, remote/desktop. Besides, real-time insights of the assets’ performance for timely fitting decisions are provided and ongoing maintenance activities can be reviewed, too, to keep the possibility for rescheduling.

A view of analysis using the Technical Object Damage Analysis chart.
A view of analysis using the Maintenance Planning Overview page.
A view of analysis using the Maintenance Orders and Operations view.

Phase-Based Maintenance

The comprehensive phase-based process supports you in the maintenance of technical objects. Maintenance requests and orders are processed according to nine phases.

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.

Processes Supporting the Phase Model

  • Reactive Maintenance – Whenever a breakdown/failure occurs, reduce asset’s downtime, increase productivity
  • Proactive Maintenance – Prevent failure/breakdowns by implementing proactive measures and preventive maintenance
  • Improvement Maintenance – Perform and track work that leads to asset’s improvements

  • Operational and Overhead Maintenance – Record activities, for example, trainings, routines, and so on

Phases and subphases within phase-based maintenance processes.

Since we set a focus on the plan, execute, and schedule phase with maintenance orders and detailed phase-based maintenance is not the focus of this course, we are going to focus on the following sub-set of phases:

  • Planning

  • Approval

  • Preparation

  • Scheduling

  • Execution

The phases before and after are also important parts, since beforehand the demand for maintenance is created via a notification and afterward post-execution work and completion are done. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, refer to the course S43400 Exploring Advanced Functions in Maintenance Processing. You can access the SAP Learning Hub Login page using the following link: https://saplearninghub.plateau.com/learning/user/common/viewItemDetails.do?componentID=S43400_EN_Col23&componentTypeID=E-Learning&fromSF=Y&revisionDate=1357992000000&menuGroup=Learning&menuItem=Cur&fromDeepLink=true&hideItemDetailsBackLink=true#/9F4DF2E44714489418005C42EE335996

Planning

Processing context of maintenance requests and their effect on maintenance orders.

The planning phase starts as soon as a maintenance request is accepted, or in other words, whenever a maintenance notification has been created. The persona in the lead is the maintenance planner who can now create and plan orders.

The first thing that a maintenance planner does upon receiving a maintenance notification is creating a maintenance order. A maintenance order is created to plan and schedule the maintenance activities for a specific asset. This includes defining the scope of work, allocating resources, estimating costs, and setting a timeline for completion. The maintenance order also serves as a central document for tracking and managing the execution of maintenance tasks, as well as recording the actual costs and time spent on the maintenance activities.

Approval

Maintenance orders are approved via a workflow process. This functionality enables users to define specific approval steps, assign responsible individuals, and set up automated notifications for task approval, helping to ensure that all maintenance activities are carefully reviewed and authorized before execution.

Setup of approval workflows for maintenance orders.

Preparation

The maintenance planner divides the maintenance effort into manageable groups, levels out the workload over a certain timespan, determines the time span for the requested maintenance work, and checks the availability of resources needed.

The maintenance planning bucket app supports maintenance planners in maintaining the maintenance backlog. Maintenance planning buckets assist you in preparing maintenance orders for execution. They allow you to focus on only those orders that are relevant for you and split them into manageable groups based on a specific time period, such as a week.

Scheduling

The SAP Fiori apps involved in the scheduling of maintenance orders.

The order is dispatched or the individual order (sub-)operations, and hence, it is confirmed that the order has been scheduled at the right work center, at the right time.

Without resource scheduling, operations cannot be dispatched individually, but the overall maintenance order and hence, all operations. After dispatching an order, new operations can still be assigned to the dispatched order and dispatched when needed. The dispatched order can be canceled anytime if it is not technically complete or flagged for deletion.

With resource scheduling, the operations can be dispatched individually. This can be done in multiple ways:

  • Scheduling operations directly (recommendation: schedule the operations of one order together)
  • Scheduling operations in a multi-step process
    • Firstly, one/more schedule simulations for the schedule period are created
    • Satisfied? Dispatch the scheduled operations and freeze the final schedule

If operations are dispatched, as a result, they are set ready for execution. There are preliminary and main operations, only if at least one of the main operations is moved to the state ready for execution the overall state of the order changes into ready for execution.

Execution

The maintenance technician receives all the orders that need to be executed and have the status ready for execution. In this phase, all preliminary and main operations are executed.

After the operations have been performed, the operations’ status must be changed to finally confirmed. To get insights into the execution status of the maintenance orders and operations, the supervisor can filter for completed orders and can change the status of the order to main work completed.

Log in to track your progress & complete quizzes

Learning

SAP FacebookSAP YoutubeSAP LinkedIn