It is important to plan, track, and allocate resources to maintenance orders within an organization. The purpose of Maintenance Order Resource Planning is to optimize the use of available resources, such as labor, equipment, and materials, to efficiently carry out maintenance activities. It helps to ensure that the necessary resources are available at the right time and place to complete maintenance orders on schedule and within budget. Besides, it provides visibility into resource utilization and helps identify potential bottlenecks or shortages, allowing for proactive management of maintenance operations.
To support planning processes, documents of SAP document management can be assigned, displayed, and created, both at the order level and the operation level. Documents in SAP document management are master data created to maintain and manage all kinds/types of real documents such as technical drawings, text documents, photos.
The document info record comprises various features (for example, different document types, versioning) and offers security for the originals, which are stored in a specific repository of SAP NetWeaver.
Planning Material
Materials required to execute a task for each operation can be planned in maintenance order. The materials can be Bills of Materials (BOMs) components for the reference object or freely assigned materials. Material planning in Plant Maintenance is integrated with Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and purchasing.
Procurement of Services
Instead of internal work centers, maintenance tasks can be performed externally by service providers, too. For this case, two procurement modes are available:
- Enhanced Procurement Mode
- Compatibility Mode (=default)
The procurement mode enables the procurement of lean services that are intended for the procurement of small/highly specialized services carried out by external suppliers as part of an external/internal operation. They can be maintained in the material master as service products, which have the product type group 2 and are delivered with the material type SERV in the standard system.
You can add lean services to a (sub-)operation as a component. You can either enter a planned lean service with the item category Non-stock item (N) or an unplanned lean service with the item category Enhanced Limit (E). Unplanned lean services are services for which the exact value is unknown when creating the purchase requisition. Instead of a fixed price, you can enter a value limit that must not be exceeded. The system checks adherence to this limit when the work performed is recorded in the service entry sheet.
The Compatibility Mode does not support lean service procurement. Still, it allows you to procure externally processed operations regardless of whether they are defined as a service. The system’s default setting is the Compatibility Mode.