Work preparation is quite valuable. The work orders you create have to make life easier for the scheduler and your technicians to do their job in the field.
Maintenance can be largely a formulaic process when it's properly planned. However, the details on work orders are often not complete. Are they created from a blank page again and again, even though you have carried out similar jobs previously, requiring the same spare parts or the same steps?
Generate new work orders
It would be so easy, if you could take past parts consumption and experience and use it to help generate new work orders. You wouldn’t have to re-input or search for materials each time you do a job. The most efficient way to create work orders for your internal maintenance or service contracts for your customer is to capitalise on your maintenance history. Extracting previous data and creating new work orders by selecting data from a checklist will save time and money.
Our advice is: Use your maintenance history like gold dust. It contains all your previous findings, from the spare parts you’ve ever used, through to the steps required to calibrate or maintain a piece of equipment, along with the estimated labour time, and turns it into a template for you to use again and again. It has a major impact on your ability to successfully plan your maintenance work.
Ready for advanced planning
Our latest SAP integrated tool, Ready4 Advanced Planning improves and facilitates work order preparation. It works by taking your past consumption and experience and uses it to generate your new work orders based on previous experience. You don’t have to re-input or search for materials each time you do a job.
Increase your master data quality
Your master data may have been good quality when it was first migrated to your SAP system, but several years down the line it may not be up to date. Getting the right SAP-integrated tool to build your master data based on your maintenance history is critical.
Improve your work preparation workflow
Manual input is timely, costly and risks human error or incomplete data fields. The Task List Generator in Ready4 Advanced Planning (R4AP) lets you extract relevant data from all your previous jobs, and update or create a task lists in SAP. The Bill of Materials (BOM) Generator in Ready4 Advanced Planning lets you link spare parts previously used to specific machines. This makes it easy when you need to re-order the same parts for a new work order, by extracting your spare parts history.
More efficiency across the board
With R4AP, not only will you be more effective and better at preparing your work orders, you will be more efficient across the board. Because good planning, means good scheduling and a much better execution.
Do you want to increase your asset uptime by improving your work planning & scheduling, field execution and real-time evaluation of your performance directly in SAP?
Author: Paul Smitherman, Marketing and Alliance Director, SOA People
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