Attaching Documents, Reason Codes and Cause Codes to Maintenance Item

Maintenance planner creates maintenance plans to ensure proper level of preventive care for various assets and avoid costly breakdowns. There are multiple methodologies and best practices to create Maintenance plans and corresponding Maintenance items within SAP Plant Maintenance.

Each Maintenance plan and corresponding item are created for some reasons and they address some of the causes that influences deterioration mechanism for a given asset. If these reasons are not captured and documented well, it would be very challenging to evaluate how effective these preventive measures are. Inefficient preventive measures could lead to either over or under maintenance of the assets that may result into higher operational cost.

A new enhancement delivered by SAP, allows assignment of one or more Document Information Records (DIR) to any maintenance item (or to maintenance package for strategy-based plans). The DIR assignment is enabled along with possible list of codes and additional attributes that helps maintenance planner to capture any other external references that may have used to arrive at a preventive maintenance plan or item.

Configuration of maintenance plan category

To enable this feature, after implementing note indicated at the end of this note, first you must configure category of maintenance plans indicating, which default catalog profile would be used for a maintenance plan, which catalog type would be used for documenting reasons and which catalog type would be used for documenting causes. The information for reasons can be displayed only if corresponding flags are set.

In the example shown above we have a maintenance plan category ZS that allows user to capture reasons and causes. It also captures default catalog profile (ZSGS) and catalog types.

(Please note that, this features should be added only with Plant Maintenance Specific maintenance plan categories. Such plans creates either a maintenance order or maintenance notifications as call object.)

Assigning documents, reasons and causes to each maintenance items

Once the maintenance plan category, is configured standard transactions to manage maintenance plans are enhanced to assign various additional attributes in two additional tabs.

Example below shows a maintenance plan used for overhaul of a pump that address Cavitation in the pump. The origin for this item was initiated after a “RCM” Reliability Centered Maintenance exercise and same is than indicated in the attribute for “Origin “. Maintenance item also has capabilities to assigned document for each of the codes that provides more detailed view on why this maintenance item was added for this pump. User can also flag to indicate that the item is important for certain legal rules and regulations.

Once the details of causes and reasons are maintained user can select and filter set of maintenance item that address certain causes or reasons in list report transactions like Ip17 and IP18. User can use codes for reasons, causes or use short description, origin, or DIR attached to the item. This allows user to manage all these Maintenance items together.

Copy information collected for one Maintenance Item to other maintenance item

If you have set these features and maintained additional information for a maintenance items that is assigned to a template maintenance plan, these additional details could be also copied to the new plan simplifying creation of maintenance plans with more appropriate details.To enable this, you must implement “Copy of maintenance plans” feature introduced with SAP Note: # 2539196.

With above note, user would see an additional flag in a copy maintenance plan pop-up that allows copy of causes and reasons including attached documents.

Maintenance orders created with the items that has these additional details and corresponding documents, would see these document as assigned document for the order providing significant information about why these preventive measure is important.

As of now, these features are available on in SAPGUI screens, they require Business Function Enterprise Asset Management Part 13 (LOG_EAM_CI_13). Refer note “2660714 Document Assignment for Maintenance Plan”

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