Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

Business Background

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling helps you optimize the scope of work and effort required for inspection, maintenance, and planned repairs. Based on legal requirements, manufacturer recommendations, and cost analyses, you determine which preventive maintenance tasks are required, which work centers are needed, and how frequently preventive maintenance tasks have to be processed to avoid breakdown time. Maintenance plans support you in specifying maintenance cycles, scheduling maintenance calls, and determining the expected costs for a specific time period. In maintenance task lists you can describe a sequence of individual maintenance activities which must be performed repeatedly within your company. In addition, you can use 2D and 3D model views to visualize technical objects, spare parts, and instructions as well as to find the spare parts you need for carrying out maintenance tasks quicker and easier.

Key Features

The following features support you with this process:

Table 47:

Key Feature Use

Planning Complex Maintenance Cycles with Strategies

Maintenance strategies help you plan complex maintenance cycles. Based on legal require­

ments, manufacturer recommendations, and cost analyses, you use maintenance strat­

egies to determine the sequence of planned maintenance and inspection tasks.

Maintenance strategies contain maintenance packages with general scheduling informa­

tion and can therefore be assigned to different maintenance plans. This reduces the time required for creating maintenance plans and allows you to update maintenance scheduling information easily.

Key Feature Use

Processing Maintenance Plans To plan recurrent maintenance work, you can create time-based and performance-based maintenance plans, strategy plans, and multiple-counter plans. In time-based maintenance planning, maintenance is performed in specific cycles, for example, every two months or every six months. With performance-based maintenance plans, you can plan regular main­

tenance based on counter readings maintained for measuring points of pieces of equip­

ment and at functional locations.

● You can create and assign maintenance items that describe which preventive mainte­

nance tasks should take place regularly for a technical object or a group of technical objects.

You can assign a task list to the maintenance item to specify the individual work steps that must be executed, the spare parts and tools required for the job, as well as the required completion time.

● You can determine the maintenance cycles as planning data. If the maintenance plan is a strategy plan, the assigned maintenance strategy determines the maintenance cy­

cles. If the maintenance plan is performance-based, you can assign counters. Further­

more, you can specify other scheduling information, such as shift factors.

● You can view the scheduled maintenance calls for the maintenance plan.

● You can determine the expected costs for a specific period. The system calculates the costs based on existing calls and uses maintenance packages and cycles as well as as­

signed task lists as sources for estimating costs.

When you schedule the maintenance plan and generate maintenance calls, the system generates maintenance call objects (for example, maintenance orders or maintenance no­

tifications) for the due date, and copies the relevant planning data into the call object. You can display the scheduled calls using the call history.

Key Feature Use Planning Recurrent Maintenance Work with Task Lists

Maintenance task lists describe a sequence of individual maintenance activities which must be performed repeatedly within a company. They contain important information about the spare parts and tools required for the work steps, the work centers involved, and the time required to perform the work. As a maintenance planner, you can use task lists to standardize these recurring work sequences and to plan inspections, maintenance, and re­

pairs more effectively. Furthermore, task lists enable you to react quickly to changing envi­

ronmental protection or occupational safety regulations that may affect continuous main­

tenance.

You can create a general task list or a task list for a specific piece of equipment or func­

tional location:

● You can provide general information, such as the responsible work center and plant, the status, and the maintenance strategy. You can also specify a validity date that can be today's date or a date in the past or future.

● You can specify the required spare parts by assigning material components from the bill of material or adding materials that are not in the BOM of the maintenance object.

● You can determine which production resources or tools are required to perform the maintenance tasks, such as measuring and inspection instruments or cranes.

● You can describe the chronological interdependence between the maintenance tasks and create relationships between operations.

● You can create, display, and assign documents.

● You can perform cost analyses that allow you to see which of the operations described have created which costs in a maintenance task list. This enables you to control your costs without creating an order.

You can use task lists to detail out the individual work steps which must be executed as well as the spare parts and tools required for the job and the required completion time.

When you then assign a task list to a maintenance item, maintenance notification, or an or­

der, the system copies this maintenance data from the task list into the respective mainte­

nance document.

Performing Inspection Rounds You can plan and perform inspection rounds on different technical objects on a regular ba­

sis. The work activities in a round are similar and require the same tools, replacement parts, and qualifications while the number of technical objects may vary, depending on the sequence and the time required. An inspection round can involve functional locations, pieces of equipment, and measuring points or counters. You can assign an inspection round to a work center or a person.

In an inspection round, you enter technical objects at the operation level of task lists or maintenance orders.

Key Feature Use Accessing Context-Sensitive In­

formation

In maintenance plan and task lists you can open quickviews and side panels to gather fur­

ther information.

Quickviews appear as separate popups when you hover over an object, and provide rele­

vant information about the technical objects or the long text.

You can open preconfigured side panels in a separate screen area and display context-sen­

sitive charts and data. You can enhance the side panels to meet your requirements, thereby specifying which information you want to have displayed in the side panel.

Processing Maintenance Plans and Items from a Personal Object Worklist

The Maintenance Plan and Maintenance Item List is an individually configurable worklist (POWL) that allows you to display and process all maintenance plans and items that match the selection criteria in the query you have defined. The POWL provides the most impor­

tant information about maintenance plans and items, enables you to carry out mass data changes and to navigate to the assigned technical objects. You can configure the list lay­

out, sort table columns, and create filters.

Selecting Spare Parts and View­

ing Visual Instructions in Task Lists

With the SAP 3D Visual Enterprise Viewer, you can use functions to visualize technical ob­

jects, spare parts and instructions. 2D and 3D model views as well as animated scenes make critical maintenance processes such as finding the spare parts you need and carry­

ing out maintenance tasks quicker and easier. Users can only display the 2D images and 3D scenes that have been published within their company.

While working in a task list you can select spare parts from a 2D or 3D model view and copy them to the spare parts list. You can also watch visual instructions on how to carry out your maintenance tasks. Visual instructions can be animated 3D scenes that visualize each and every maintenance step at operation level, for example.

Viewing Relationships between Maintenance Objects in the Asset Viewer

The Asset Viewer is a display tool that enables simple navigation through complex object relationships and flexible navigation within and between objects. You can also view and navigate through the hierarchical structure of technical objects.