Both SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori offer features that help maintenance planners plan and schedule critical maintenance and manage any backlog of maintenance work effortlessly.
The apps described in this post provide additional capabilities to the maintenance planner to view and monitor the work center on a handheld device, get real-time insights, and act accordingly. Planners can arrange the information that is provided in the form or information cards. The app's additional analytics on these cards provide even more insight.
Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planners
The tiles added to the Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planner app help planners view the key figures of their work center utilization. This includes items such as work center current week’s and coming weeks’ utilization, prioritized lists of maintenance orders, and the maintenance orders that are due during a certain period of time.
The planner can view the order backlogs using the processing statuses of Dispatched, Due, and In Process. Planners can also set a broad range of filtering criteria to get the information that is needed for carrying out an effective maintenance planning.
The figure below shows the Resource Scheduling overview screen for planners with the key figures needed for resource planning, such as 3 Due Maintenance Orders and 25 Unconfirmed Maintenance Orders.
The planner can add the work center by linking the work center that he is responsible for. This activity is a prerequisite to get any key performance indicator (KPI) figures populated. The user can then drill into any of the cards, navigate to the top-right area, and select specific work centers for planning.
Work center utilization can be sliced and diced by applying various filters, such as priority, order type, activity type, processing status, and control key. The left side of the figure below lists all work orders from the past six months that are also created for work centers HEM-E1 and DCHEM-M1. The right side of the same figure provides a graph for visualizing utilization by specified weeks; in this example, it shows approximately 8% of the work orders dispatched at this time and the rest remain in the Due status.
The planner can take actions by looking at the work center utilization, and operations can be dispatched easily. This card in the Resource Scheduling for Maintenance Planner app allows the planner to dispatch, change, and also cancel the dispatch of the operations to the work center level.
The planner can also decide between triggering or canceling the dispatch. Below shows that the utilization for work center DCHEM-E1 is above the target for week 07 before dropping down to well under the target the following week, but work center DCHEM-M1 remains below the target through week 07 and week 08
Maintenance Scheduling Board
The Maintenance Scheduling Board app is the key for any planners in a maintenance organization because it helps them provide a graphical view of the maintenance orders, operations, and suboperations for the work center they are responsible for.
The app helps the planner resolve any scheduling conflicts that are identified. Planners can drill down the hierarchy starting from the order header down to operations and suboperations. The filtering criteria can be applied based on order type, processing status, and work order priority to view in a Gantt chart like the one shown here:
The Maintenance Scheduling Board app was further enhanced with the 2021 release of SAP S/4HANA. It now performs the dispatching and makes changes to dispatched orders in the same Gantt chart view. To perform backlog management, a new SAP Fiori app called Maintenance Backlog Overview is now available. You can divide the maintenance effort into manageable groups based on their scope. The scope of a planning bucket includes time and other important attributes of the maintenance jobs, such as the planner group. Based on this scope, the system groups orders and assigns them to the corresponding planning buckets.
The figure below shows the planning buckets by order type, which includes two past work orders and two future planning buckets. This helps the planner be aware of the backlog, build weekly schedules, and drill down into orders and operations to adjust start dates.
The next figure shows a popup box that appears when you click on a line item, allowing you to update the dates on the work order. The graph on the right side of the screen shows the scheduling features of the app, where you can see overlapping maintenance activities and adjust the start dates.
Schedule Maintenance Order Operations
The maintenance scheduler can schedule planned work orders by building weekly schedules in the Manage Schedule app. You can view the grouping of the maintenance order that is due for scheduling by time period and status. The figure below shows the weekly schedule orders that are not completely dispatched; the planner can set a start date for a group of orders or schedule them automatically.
Assign Maintenance Order Operations
With the new Assign Maintenance Order Operations app, you can assign maintenance order operations to the person responsible for carrying them out, as shown in the next figure. In this example, there are three work orders that are not yet assigned to a maintenance technician. The scheduler can select the order and click the Assign button to complete the assignment; they can also change or delete existing assignments.
Conclusion
These SAP Fiori apps should be a big benefit to maintenance planners working with an SAP S/4HANA system. Which app is most interesting to you?
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Logistics with SAP S/4HANA: An Introduction by Deb Bhattacharjee, Vishal Khandalkar, Falguni Thompson, and Guillermo B. Vazquez.
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