Are all plants in SAP PM, either maintenance or planning plants?

[snipersap]

Trying to understand how SAP PM is setup and the PM process in general, I came up with a question - Are all plants in PM, either maintenance plants or planning plants?

In real life or in SAP, is there a scenario , where a plant may not be either of the above?

Kindly explain with an example. Thank you.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Suomyo,

Plants in SAP are used across all of the logistics functions, including Sales, Production, Inventory, Purchasing, and Maintenance. They are created in the same place in config: Logistics-General (and stored in Table T001W). Each Plant is within a financial Company Code. Any Plant in that table is a Maintenance Plant. There may be many used only for other functions, and never used for Maintenance.

By default, Plants are assigned as their own Planning Plant. In config Assignment, you can change the Planning Plant to be any other Plant from the table.

From a real life perspective, any place that has objects to maintain needs to be a plant. (Can be virtual. Does not have to be one physical location.) The people and resources need to be in a Planning Plant, as they will be Work Centers. To each Maint. Plant, you assign the Planning Plant that is providing (the majority of) the maintenance.

You have the two definitions, since the business group that owns the equipment financially (Company Code) may be getting the maintenance service from another business group. A common case is for one manufacturing site to contain the production equipment for multiple groups. Each are (Maintenance) Plants. Perhaps only the largest group at the site has the maintenance staff, and maintains the equipment for the other groups at the site, as well as their own.

TRE

[snipersap · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the insightful answer. To clarify, when you say

There may be many used only for other functions, and never used for Maintenance.

can you give me one example of such a function other than maintenance? It will help in getting a perspective on it.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Soumyo,

One example: If a company is a distributor and only buys, stores, sells, and ships the items to customers, they would need a Plant in SAP. The Plant would be used by Purchasing, Inventory, Sales, and Distribution. Any maintenance needs might be done by a service provider, so they would not use SAP PM.

TRE