The purpose of Preventive Maintenance is to maintain the high availability of technical systems, for example production equipment & assets, in the long term, by pre-defining regular/periodic Maintenance activities.  This systematic servicing of equipment reduces the possibility of failure and downtime.

The Preventive Maintenance system is used to define:

• regular inspections of equipment due to legal requirements, quality insurance or technical requirements
• periodic maintenance of technical objects (as requested by the Vendor, by the operating conditions....)

This can be used to:

• store activities to be performed, in the form of maintenance Task Lists which define the extent of work to be performed
• define the frequency of these recurring activities with time-based and/or counter-based criteria

Click on the headings in blue shown below to get the details for each Preventive Maintenance topics.

3.1 Task List

Maintenance Task Lists describe the sequence of individual maintenance activities which must be executed in a repair or maintenance job, along with teams involved.

Task lists can be specific to a Piece of Equipment, to a Functional Location,  or can be generic (General Task List).

Task list are useful for repetitive jobs: they allow to easily create the work order used to carry out each individual repair/job. They are mostly used in planned maintenance, but can also be used in regular (unplanned) maintenance.

3.2 Maintenance Strategy, Item & Plans

Maintenance Plan is the object in SAP which allows to completely define periodic jobs. It contains  the scope of the tasks : Objects involved(Functional Location or Equipment), description of the job  and scheduling parameters (dates, frequency...)

Most maintenance plans can be defined with a single fixed cycle, for instance : task to be performed every 6 months,   every 100 operating hours (Single Cycle Maintenance Plan).

More complex Maintenance plans with strategies can be defined in case several criteria must be taken into consideration for the scheduling of tasks (for example: operations whose execution - or exclusion- depends on preliminary execution of others).

The  Strategy defines  the criteria/rules for the execution of operations and the cycle in which the individual work should be performed, and contain extra data which could affect scheduling

Item : A Maintenance Plan can contain several Maintenance jobs that must be scheduled together/ in parallel (with same scheduling parameter). Each job is defined in an Item, which describes the periodic tasks for each separate object (a group of technical objects).  

A Maintenance Plan will automatically generate a Work Order (or a  Notification) at any occurrence requested in the cycle (depending on the scheduling parameters) to request the execution of the works. The Work Order (Notification) will be fully prepared, with information defined in the Maintenance Plan/Items.

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