Do you know the situation of board games when you draw a card that asks you to go back to the start. Maybe this metaphor is too pointed, but I would like to invite you to open a new chapter for Maintenance Management as part of the LoB Asset Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

It’s my pleasure to present to you in this blog the fruits of long-term co-innovation with our customers in the area of Maintenance Management.

Watch my video and get a quick overview of our 2011 highlights:

Maintenance Process

New “Best Practices” End-to-End-processes

So far, the scope items

• • Corrective Maintenance (BH1)
  • Emergency Maintenance (BH2)
  • Preventive Maintenance (BJ2)

describe the straightforward basic processes based on SAP ERP best practice scenarios with very limited configuration capabilities. These scope items will be set to “not standard relevant” in the future.

With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2011 release, we are offering four new scope items as successor:

• Reactive Maintenance (4HH)
• Proactive Maintenance (4HI)
• Improvement Maintenance (4VT)
• Operational and Overhead Maintenance (4WM)

New customers should use the new scope items only. Reason for this recommendation is that innovations will be provided only with the new scope items 4HH, 4HI, 4VT, and 4WM.
Customers who are still using the “old” scope items BH1, BH2, and BJ2, can continue to use these scope items, but SAP recommends to migrate to the new scope items.

By the way: The license scope item Maintenance Resource Scheduling (43R) will continue to work with both old and new scope items and will be updated in the future as per the roadmap of S/4HANA Asset management for resource scheduling.

What’s new with the new scope items 4HH, 4HI, 4VT, and 4WM:

So far maintenance processes were controlled by the system status of several business objects. The new “Best Practices” end-to-end processes introduce process phases and a new concept for user statuses. The simplified Status Management guides users along the process. Each process phase is correlated with a user role.

Phase Model for the Maintenance Process

The new phase model allows you to create maintenance requests and maintenance orders of specific new types. These maintenance requests and orders are then part of an end-to-end process that is structured according to nine phases. The following picture shows for instance the sequence of the nine phases for the best practice process Reactive Maintenance.

Fig.1: Sequence of process phases for the best practice process Reactive Maintenance

SAP Help documentation for Maintenance Process Phases explains in detail the nine phases:

• Initiation
• Screening
• Planning
• Approval
• Preparation
• Scheduling
• Execution
• Post-Execution
• Completion

For example, the Initiation and Execution phases are typically performed by a technician, whereas the planner is taking care of the Preparation phase by planning the maintenance backlog and carrying out the cost analysis in the Post-Execution phase. The newly introduced role of the Supervisor acts as a gatekeeper who coordinates between technician and planner. For this reason, the official name of the supervisor business role is Maintenance Gatekeeper.

Fig.2: Business roles for Maintenance Management

New Order Types

With the past 2008 release, new configuration steps for Maintenance Activity Types were introduced. My past blog shows these configuration steps in a short video. Based on the old scope items BH1, BH2, and BJ2 only three order types for corrective, preventive, and unplanned maintenance were available up to the 2008 release and the limited configuration steps were only grouped in one sub application area Maintenance Management.

Now with the 2011 release and the introduction of the new scope items 4HH, 4HI, 4VT, and 4WM , we are introducing five new order types and a wealth of new configuration capabilities which are now grouped in six sub application areas.
The following short video shows the new configuration sub application areas for Asset Management, the configuration steps for Order Processing where you will find the configuration steps for Maintenance Activity Types, and the configuration step Default Values for Maintenance Activity Type for Each Order Type with the new order types highlighted with yellow color.

Fig.3: Configure Your Solution – Order Processing with new order types

If you create maintenance orders, you can now select one of the following new order types:

• Reactive Maintenance
• Proactive Maintenance
• Improvement Maintenance
• Operational Maintenance
• Overhead Maintenance

Then the maintenance order runs through several approval, planning, preparation and execution steps until it is finally completed. The individual phases are divided into sub-phases which – similar to an overall status – document the progress in the maintenance process. You can filter, sort and group the maintenance orders according to the phases or sub-phases in several order list views.

New SAP Fiori apps

New SAP Fiori apps are available for the new “Best Practices” end-to-end processes which allow you to perform your daily work both on PCs and mobile devices. Here is an overview of the new SAP Fiori apps:

• Create Maintenance Request
• My Maintenance Requests
• Screen Maintenance Requests
• Manage Maintenance Planning Buckets
• Manage Maintenance Backlog
• My Maintenance Jobs
• Manage Maintenance Notifications and Orders
• Manage Workflows for Maintenance Orders
• Maintenance Order Costs

Starting with the Initiation phase of the Reactive Maintenance process, the Create Maintenance Request app allows a technician in the Initiation phase to easily capture technical objects from mobile devices using QR code and upload a picture directly taken from the mobile device to enhance the failure data. The system will let you know if a maintenance request was already created for this technical object. For saving time you can use a text template to describe the issue.

Watch the following video which shows how a technician creates a new maintenance request by using a smartphone.

Fig.4: Initiation phase – SAP Fiori app Create Maintenance Requests

The maintenance requests created by you are available in the My Maintenance Requests app.

The submitted maintenance request moves to the Screening phase. Here, maintenance requests are screened and accepted.

As a Maintenance Gatekeeper, you can review all the open maintenance requests in the Screen Maintenance Requests app. If information is insufficient, you can send the request back to the initiator. When the initiator provides information and resubmits the request, you can review the request again.

In the home screen of the app, the maintenance requests are grouped according to their statuses (Open, Accepted, Rejected, Action Required, and Completed).

While reviewing a request, you can also edit information related to malfunction, responsibility, priority, and other details.

You can create priorities in the Define Priorities for Each Priority Type self-service configuration UI (SSCUI). You can also assess priority by selecting a combination of consequence categories, consequences, and likelihood. Prioritization profiles can be defined using the SSCUI Define Prioritization Profiles. For more information, see Configuration for Key Users.

The priority defines the importance of the maintenance request. The priority helps to derive the key dates for a maintenance request such as the required start date, required end date, and the final due date. The following figure shows new Risk-based Event Prioritization-Matrix as basis of the assess priority functionality.

Fig.5: New Risk-based Event Prioritization-Matrix

Watch the video which shows how a maintenance supervisor is screening the maintenance request that the technician has submitted before.

Fig.5: Screening phase – SAP Fiori app Screen Maintenance Requests

At the end of the above video, the supervisor accepts the maintenance request and the system informs the user that the notification is accepted. The accepted maintenance request is now known as a maintenance notification.

Accepted maintenance requests move to the Planning phase.

As a Maintenance Planner, you can now create and plan orders. When you create an order, the order is in the phase Planning and sub-phase In Planning (Order). Depending upon the configuration of the order type in the SSCUI Activate Workflow for Order Type, an order needs a cost approval. If the workflow is configured for the order type, the order goes through the workflow steps for approval.

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 helps 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.

Watch the next video that shows how the maintenance planner creates an order with the maintenance notification created in the previous video. Afterwards the user creates a new Maintenance Planning Bucket. By pressing the Manage Backlog button the planner navigates to the Manage Maintenance Backlog app which offers the Change Scheduling options.

Fig.6: Preparation phase – SAP Fiori apps to Manage the Maintenance Backlog 

Resource Scheduling

Next on, coming to Resource Scheduling for maintenance planners which is correlated to the Scheduling phase.

Without Resource Scheduling, the maintenance planner or supervisor cannot dispatch operations individually but dispatches maintenance orders with all their operations.

With Resource Scheduling, the maintenance planner or supervisor dispatches the order operations and sub-operations and passes the orders to the Execution phase.

For using Resource Scheduling the license scope item Maintenance Resource Scheduling (43R) is necessary. Here is an overview of new features in Resource Scheduling.

Manage Work Center Utilization

Work Center filter for the utilization chart

The Manage Work Center Utilization app allows you to use additional filters from the header bar, view new columns in the table, and view the utilization filtered by one or more work centers. The chart is updated as per your selected work centers while keeping other settings the same. The chart title is also renamed to indicate the number of selected work centers. Watch the following short video to see how the work center filter acts.

Fig.7: Work Center filter for the utilization chart in Manage Work Center Utilization app 

App Extensibility

In addition you can now extend the Manage Work Center Utilization app to display additional custom fields.

Flexible schedule periods

The Manage Work Center Utilization app enables the maintenance planner to maintain flexible schedule periods.

When you create a schedule, you can now choose a date range to specify the schedule period. The schedule period can be a minimum of one day or even exceed one week. This is in contrast to the earlier concept of a target week, where you could create a schedule of only one week.

The following figure shows that the user selects for instance a period of 2 weeks when creating a new schedule.

Fig.8: Select flexible schedule periods in the Manage Work Center Utilization app

Manage Schedules

Drag-and-Drop

In the Manage Schedules app, you can now use the drag-and-drop feature to manually schedule an order operation. Watch the short video to see how the drag-and-drop feature is used in the system.

Fig.9: Drag-and-Drop in Manage Schedules app

Maintenance Scheduling Board

The Maintenance Scheduling Board app allows you now to use additional filters from the header bar, view new columns in the table, and use additional settings for the Gantt chart. Let me highlight here the new condensed mode for the Gantt chart. When you select the option Switch On Condensed Mode, the Gantt chart is displayed in a condensed mode, which optimally uses the limited screen space and you can view more in the same chart. The short video shows the look and feel of using the condensed mode.

Fig.10: Condensed Mode for Maintenance Scheduling Board app

New APIs

Finally, let us have a look on the new APIs.

API for Maintenance Notification

The Maintenance Notification API is used to notify the maintenance department about an abnormal or exceptional situation in technical objects in plant area. This service enables you to create, read, and update data related to maintenance notification.

Fig.11: New ODATA APIs – Maintenance Notification – Overview

You will find detailed information about the Maintenance Notification API in SAP API Business Hub and in SAP Help Documentation.

API for Maintenance Order Operation Confirmation

With the API for Maintenance Order Operation Confirmation, you can confirm maintenance operations. You can post time confirmations for one or more operations of an order.

You will find detailed information about the Maintenance Order Operation Confirmation API in SAP API Business Hub and in SAP Help Documentation.

Thanks for reading this blog post. Stay tuned!

You will find a collection of my SAP S/4HANA Cloud release blogs here:

• The Link Collection for Asset Management
• The Link Collection for Manufacturing & Supply Chain

You may be also interested in this blog for Service Management.

If you’re interested to learn more about these innovations, join our SAP Learning Hub and participate in our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Early Release Series. Read this blog to find out how you can license for the Enterprise Support Edition as a Customer / Partner and benefit from our regular release series either live or on-demand.

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
• Article from Oliver Betz on SAP News here
• Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2011 Release Blog
• SAP S/4HANA Microlearning (OP/CL) – The ultimate collection blog
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community: register here
• SAP Activate Community here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here
• Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @GerhardWelker and LinkedIn