Do you want to:
- Simplify complex maintenance tasks?
- Ensure that your equipments run at peak efficiency all the time in a sustainable manner?
- Prevent breakdowns and minimize the disruption to your customers’ business activities?
- Be proactive and remind your customers when it’s time for maintenance instead of waiting for them to call?
If the answer to any of the above questions is in affirmative, SAP Cloud for Service provides you the solution.
Definition
Services are not just performed when things break-down, but regular and periodic care is required to ensure that equipments remain in good condition. Service businesses or organizations that provide service along with their products often provide preventive maintenance services as part of their offerings. These services are sometimes included in warranty agreements, or sold to the customer as part of the service contract.
Maintenance Plans is a new feature in C4S (available from 1508 release) that helps the service organization execute on the preventive maintenance scenarios by automatically creating work tickets based on the maintenance schedule.
A key part of a maintenance plan is to specify when maintenance work is to be done. There are a few ways to determine the Scheduling Conditions:
- Based on a counter (e.g. how much the machine has operated)
- Based on a time period
- Based on a combination of a counter and a time period
Another key aspect is the Scheduling Type (Schedule Intervals). The following are supported:
Creation
The Maintenance Plans are created by combining the Schedule Type and Schedule Conditions explained above. The PLAN DEFINITION is created by choosing the measurement attributes and corresponding values.
Here are some examples:
- Cyclical - Counter Based:
Odometer reading every 10,000 mi
2. Cyclical - Time and counter based:
Odometer reading every 12,000 mi or Maintenance done every 12 months
3. Fixed - Time based:
Regular maintenance at 12 months; 20 months; 36 months
Registered Products are added as MAINTENANCE ITEMS in the Maintenance Plan. These are the covered objects under the Plan. Multiple registered products can be added in one maintenance plan.
The conditions defined are evaluated on the maintenance items’ counters (readings). These readings are captured in Registered Product.
In example 1 above:
Schedule Type is Cyclical
Schedule Conditions is Counter based
Measurement Attribute is Odometer reading
Let’s name this Maintenance Plan as ‘Regular Maintenance’ and give it ID ‘MP1’. And let’s add a Registered Product 'CarModel01' as maintenance item in this plan.
As a pre-requisite, the same measurement attribute needs to be added in the Registered Products (which are Maintenance Items in the Plan) as the Measurement Log. The actual Measurement Readings are recorded against the Measurement Log in the Registered Product UI.
In our example, we create a new measurement log in the registered product 'CarModel01' with the attribute ‘Odometer Reading’.
The TICKET TEMPLATE inside a Maintenance Plan helps you to define a template based on which the values are populated in the Ticket that gets automatically generated by a maintenance plan. For example, you can set the Document type, Subject, Service Category, Incident Category etc.
Execution
The administrator can create Maintenance Plan Runs and schedule jobs from the Admin UI. Based on the jobs, the tickets are automatically created (based on the defined template) if the defined conditions are met.
To continue with our example - We create a Maintenance Plan Run (ID ‘1’) and schedule the job. We then assign this Run ID ‘1’ in the Maintenance Plan ‘MP1’ (Regular Maintenance) that we created above. Now the job runs as per the schedule and if the defined condition is met the ticket will be created.
RELATED TICKETS shows the list of all tickets created through a Maintenance Plan.
So go ahead and try out the different scenarios that are possible with this new feature!
