Preparing and Scheduling Maintenance

Once an order is approved for execution and released, it is set to In Preparation and passed to the Preparation phase. In this phase, the maintenance planner divides the maintenance effort into manageable groups, levels out the workload over several weeks, determines the concrete time period for the requested maintenance work and checks the availability of all the resources, spare parts and services needed.

The Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets app aids the maintenance planner 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.

The maintenance planner creates maintenance planning buckets and defines the planning bucket scope. This scope includes a specific time period, such as a concrete calendar week, and other important attributes, such as the maintenance planning plant or the main work center. Based on this scope, the system groups maintenance orders and assigns them to the corresponding planning buckets. If the scheduled start and end dates of an order fulfill the selection criteria of an individual bucket, this order is associated with this particular bucket.

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, the maintenance planner can view important order details, such as the order status, the order priority and the final due date. Furthermore, he can check the availability and consumption of the required stock components and non-stock components and consider all the maintenance work that has to be executed and all the external services that have to be procured. With the help of colored icons indicating the overall readiness of the order, the maintenance planner can identify easily whether the maintenance order is time-critical, whether the required materials and services are available and whether the order has already been submitted for scheduling. They can then take action and manage the availability of certain resources or reschedule the maintenance order by changing the scheduled start and end dates.

Once the maintenance planner is confident that all the required resources will be available on the required dates, they can select individual orders, choose Submit for Scheduling and thereby pass them on to the Scheduling phase.

The SAP Fiori apps applicable for this phase are:

• Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets (F3888)

• Manage Maintenance Backlog (F4073)

• Maintenance Backlog Overview (F5105)

Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets

With this app, you can create maintenance planning buckets that aid you in effectively managing your maintenance backlog. You can create operational maintenance planning buckets or event-based maintenance planning buckets. Operational maintenance planning buckets are recurrent planning buckets that allow you to plan regular maintenance work. They are generated automatically based on the time and recurrence details that you specify. Event-based maintenance planning buckets are one-time planning buckets that help you to organize major maintenance events, where a group of maintenance orders needs to be planned and executed during the same period.

For each planning bucket, you define a planning bucket scope which includes a specific time period, such as a concrete calendar week, and other attributes, such as the maintenance planning plant or the main work center. When you plan recurrent maintenance work, the system automatically groups maintenance orders and associates them with a specific planning bucket based on the scope. When you plan a maintenance event, you assign orders manually to the event. In this case, the scope restricts which orders can be assigned to the event.

A planning bucket is a logical container to group maintenance orders so that a planner is supported to manage their maintenance backlog.

A planning bucket is defined by the following selection criteria:

• Maintenance Planning Plant
• A time period triggering the selection of maintenance orders according to scheduling dates
• Main work center or maintenance planner group
• Maintenance Plant or maintenance plant section
• Technical object

Two different types of planning buckets are offered:

• Once-off planning buckets help you to group orders for a particular event
• Recurrent planning bucket might be defined as weekly maintenance windows

The collaboration between maintenance and production teams becomes easier if both refer to the same bucket. A planning bucket and the associated maintenance orders are then evaluated in the Manage Maintenance Backlog application.

With the Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets (F3888), you can create maintenance planning buckets that aid you in effectively managing your maintenance backlog. The app supports the maintenance planner in the Maintenance Order Preparation phase to level out the work load 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.

By defining maintenance planning buckets, you can divide the maintenance effort into manageable groups based on their scope. The scope of a planning bucket includes time, but also other important attributes of the maintenance jobs such as the maintenance planning plant or the main work center.

You can create once-off or recurrent planning buckets. Once-off planning buckets help you to organize a planned shutdown or overhaul of an entire plant section, for example. For planning recurrent maintenance work, such as weekly maintenance windows as agreed with the production team, you can use recurrent planning buckets.

When the maintenance planning buckets have been created and maintenance orders have been associated with particular planning buckets, you can manage your maintenance backlog. From a particular planning bucket, you navigate to the list of all the maintenance orders associated with this planning bucket. Here, you can view important order details, such as the order status, the order priority and the final due date. Furthermore, you can check the availability and consumption of the required stock components and non-stock components and consider all the maintenance work that has to be executed and all the external services that have to be procured.

You can view all maintenance orders automatically assigned to a particular planning bucket according to their scheduling dates and to the attributes fitting in the scope of the planning bucket.

This application is provided via Business Catalog SAP_EAM_BC_PLNBKTS_MNG_PC. This business catalog belongs to the Maintenance Planner role.

Operational 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.

Context

To set up operational planning buckets, you create a reference planning bucket with specific time data and other criteria to specify which maintenance orders should be selected. Based on the details of the reference planning bucket, the system generates new planning buckets on an ongoing basis and assigns backlogs with matching maintenance orders to them. You can access these backlogs directly from each individual planning bucket.

Result

When you have created a reference planning bucket, the system continually generates new planning buckets based on the data in the reference planning bucket. It automatically assigns maintenance orders to the planning buckets according to their scheduled start date, their scheduled end date, and to the scope attributes that have been defined in the reference planning bucket.

The reference planning bucket and all planning buckets that have been generated from it are displayed in the Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets app. You can access the list of assigned orders by selecting a planning bucket from the list and choosing Manage Backlog.

A maintenance event allows you to group several maintenance activities to be performed during a maintenance window for a technical object. To create a maintenance event, you first create an event-based planning bucket in the Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets app. Then you create a maintenance event inside the planning bucket.

Prerequisites

Before you create a maintenance event, check the pre-configured maintenance event types or define your own maintenance event types in the configuration activity Maintain Maintenance Event Type. The configuration settings in this activity determine whether an administrative maintenance order is created for a maintenance event

Result

You can view the maintenance event, the maintenance event type, and the ID of the administrative maintenance order in the Event Planning section, and you can navigate directly to the order object page to view or edit the order details.

With this app, you can view a list of all maintenance orders automatically associated with a specific maintenance planning bucket according to their scheduled start date, their scheduled end date and to the attributes fitting in the scope of the maintenance planning bucket. You can view important order details, such as the order status, the order priority and the final due date. Moreover, you can check the availability and consumption of the required stock components and non-stock components and you can view all maintenance work and external services that have to be executed.

The maintenance planner launches this application mainly during the preparation phase of those maintenance orders that are associated with a certain planning bucket.

During the planning phase, the maintenance planner plans the work and finally submits this order for approval. After the approval has been granted, a maintenance planer will release the order so that this order enters the preparation phase.

The following actions are triggered from this application:

• The maintenance planner submits a maintenance order for scheduling so that a scheduler will dispatch the planned work later on. In this context, the maintenance planner considers the following aspects:

  • After a maintenance order has been released, the procurement process is initiated. Starting with the generation of purchase requisitions resulting from the non-stock component, lean services or a service assigned to operations of that order. Here, the maintenance planner monitors whether the purchase order has been already created and whether the delivery dates will match the requirement dates.
  • For stock components, a maintenance planer monitors whether the committed quantity match planned quantity as defined in an operation of that order.

• The maintenance planner changes the scheduling dates of a maintenance order by assigning this order to the previous or next bucket.

  The final due date of each order is evaluated and the corresponding traffic light indicates whether this order requires a high attention.

The content of the Manage Maintenance Backlog application is derived from the associated maintenance orders that refer to the selected planning bucket. The content of this application is divided into five tabs:

• Orders tab: Identify time-critical maintenance work by monitoring the final due date.

• Stock Components tab: Check the availability and consumption of the required stock components.

• Non-Stock Components tab: Check the availability of the required non-stock components.

• Services tab: Check the availability of the required external services including lean service.

• Resources tab: Check the work progress by evaluating the forecast work, the actual work and the remaining work.

As prerequisite for this application, planning buckets should be created. For recurrent planning buckets, the configuration of the reference planning bucket should define at least some buckets in advance.

With this app, you can view a list of all maintenance orders automatically associated with a specific maintenance planning bucket according to their scheduled start date, their scheduled end date and to the attributes fitting in the scope of the maintenance planning bucket. You can view important order details, such as the order status, the order priority and the final due date. Moreover, you can check the availability and consumption of the required stock components and non-stock components and you can view all maintenance work and external services that have to be executed.

This app provides a single screen view to the maintenance planner where they can see the details of the maintenance backlogs (orders/notifications) of the planning buckets they have chosen to view based on the values provided in the filter section.

The landing page of the has a user interface with a filter section and two separate cards.

The following filters are available in the filter section for this app:

• Planning Bucket Template: Indicates the base planning bucket to be used in the app. The filter has a F4 value help with certain standard search options to locate a specific bucket of users choice.
• Past Buckets: Indicates the number of buckets in the past with reference to the base planning bucket.
• Future Buckets: Indicates the number of buckets in the future with reference to the base planning bucket.
• Phase: Indicates the phases which can be additionally selected to filter the entries.

The following cards are available in this app:

• Maintenance Backlog card: The maintenance backlog card has a dropdown with four options to group the chart by:

  • Phase

    The phase category displays the various maintenance backlogs (orders/notifications) based on the phase in which they are in.

    A navigation is enabled for the phase dropdown. By clicking on the stack bar, it navigates to the respective app showing the exact orders and/or notifications respectively. For example on click of phase 3, the navigation happens to the Find Maintenance Orders apps list view, and the relevant orders are displayed in the result area of the list view.

  • Priority

  • Order/Notification Type

  • Activity Type

  The Priority, Order/Notification Type and Activity Type categories are used to display the backlogs based on the activity type, backlog type and priority respectively. There is no navigation supported for these categories.

• The Quick Links card: The Quick Links card is an easy to use card with which a user can navigate to the specific app (without any filters). It’s a simple navigation. The apps currently supported in this card are:

  • Screen Maintenance Requests

  • Manage Maintenance Notifications and Orders

  • Find Maintenance Orders and Operation

  • Find Maintenance Order

Once the maintenance planner has selected one or more maintenance orders in the Manage Maintenance Backlog app and chosen Submit for Scheduling, the selected orders with all of their operations are set to Ready to Schedule and passed to the Scheduling phase. During this phase, the maintenance planner or supervisor dispatches the maintenance order, or the individual order operations and sub-operations, and thereby confirms that they have been scheduled at the right work center and at the right time.

When individual operations and sub-operations are dispatched and as a result set to Ready for Execution, it depends on the execution stage of the operations and sub-operations whether the maintenance order itself is passed to the Execution phase.

If only preliminary tasks (operations with execution stage PRE) have been dispatched, the order stays in the Scheduling phase.

As soon as the first main repair task (operation with execution stage MAIN) has been dispatched, the order itself moves to the Execution phase. This phase then is also displayed in the order header.