Downtime and PM order integration with SAP PPDS

Introduction:-

While executing detailed scheduling, maintenance of machines often must be taken into consideration, so that the production schedule can be as accurate as possible. However, a machine or work center can be down for multiple reasons and not just maintenance. Some of them are specified below-

1. Preventive maintenance
2. Breakdown
3. Unavailability of material or labor
4. Mock safety drill
5. Election voting
6. Physical inventory counting
7. Labor strike
8. Sudden declaration of public holiday by government
9. Any other situation which is not directly related to machine downtime

In case of preventive maintenance, it is easy to know the schedule and hence incorporate while performing production scheduling. However, for other cases, it needs a daily intervention in schedule where exact expected hours of downtime can be booked. Some of these issues can be sorted by changing factory calendar holidays or using special rules. However, it often goes to the consultant as planner himself may not have access to perform those changes. The turnaround time can be a challenge in this case.

SAP PPDS provides great help to cater such situations, by simply providing a tab to maintain downtimes.

This blog explains how the downtime maintenance works in case of integration with PM as well as manual entry by planner.

Assumptions:-

1. Knowledge about Basic PPDS functionalities.
2. Knowledge about PM master data, maintenance scheduling, etc.

1. Integrating downtime with PM schedule:-

Steps-

1. Create Maintenance work center
2. Create Functional location/Equipment for the work center
3. Assign production work center/Resource to Functional Location/Equipment
4. Plan/Create maintenance orders for functional location/Equipment with following settings-
5. System condition = Not in operation
6. Duration of work (Start and End time)
7. Check downtime tab in resource master to verify if corresponding downtime is visible.
8. Check DS board to verify if corresponding time slot is greyed out, meaning to scheduling can be done in this period.

PPDS Resource showing downtime tab. Currently no downtime is maintained-

DS board showing Situation before considering downtime. Double click on an order to see start and end time of the same-

Assign PPDS resource to PM functional Location-

Create Maintenance order. In this case, maintenance is planned for 6 hours-

PPDS Resource downtime tab is automatically updated with the details of shutdown (Type of downtime = PM order)-

Also, DS board is updated with grey area showing machine downtime and change in end time for the production order-

2. Maintaining downtime directly in resource master:-

Steps-

1. Maintain downtime in resource master in PPDS
2. Execute DS board to visualize the downtime

PPDS Resource showing downtime tab. Currently no downtime is maintained-

DS board showing Situation before considering downtime. Double click on the order to see start and end times of the same-

Maintain downtime hours in resource. In this case, 3 hours are maintained for physical inventory count-

DS Board after maintaining the downtime shows a grey area in the order span. Also, double click on the order to see that end time is pushed by 3 hours.

Pros and Cons of using PM integrated downtime:-

Pros:

• Automatic blocking of resource capacity based on PM schedule.
• Production schedule can have most updated downtime information.
• Planner can interact with maintenance team in case any schedule needs to be altered.

Cons:

• The downtimes from PM Orders cannot be deleted or modified within PPDS. This means dependency on the team responsible for maintaining the PM Orders.
• If actual maintenance downtime is more than time mentioned in PM Order, then it will not be reflected in PPDS.

Considerations while choosing between Manual Entry of downtime or PM schedule integration:-

1. Accuracy of PM schedule
2. Frequent stoppages in equipment apart from maintenance events
3. Coordination between production and maintenance streams
4. Breakdown history
5. Master data in PM – Assignment of production resource to PM equipment/Functional location, system condition, etc.
6. Standby resources

Conclusion:-

PM and PPDS integration is a very good functionality to have tight integration between the two functions so that production schedule can be more robust.