What are the Best Practices for usage of Plant Maintenance Orders?

[lisa_savinovich]

Hi Experts,

We are midsize company and are fairly active with our use plant maintenance orders.  In addition, our PM orders are linked to WBS Elements. Thus, when executing WBS Element reports with a high volume of maintenance orders the performance is impacted.  Given that there are various costs associated in the volume of orders that a company may use (i.e. settlement/assessment performance, report performance, master data maintenance, attempting to aggregate the orders together to understand and view costs at a higher process level), what are other companies doing to keep a balance between the plant maintenance users and the financial/management reporting users?  Is total expected cost ever factored in the strategy for maintenance orders?

I look forward to your comments.

[Former Member]

Instead of grouping orders directly with WBS element, you can use revisions to group small amount of orders, in turn you can group those in WBS.

Execution part can be seen using PMIS & cost reports can be viewed in terms of WBS. Also you can create Main order & Sub orders assigned to Main order, so that sub order settlement will be done to Main order in turn Main order will be settled to WBS.

I hope I understood your question & given some idea appropriately. If you are not looking for this, please rephrase your question.

[lisa_savinovich]

Hello Maheswaran,

Thank you for your response.  It is partially what I am looking for in terms of feedback.

As for my question “What are the Best Practices for usage of Plant Maintenance Orders?”, I am looking for how different companies manage the volume of PM orders from 1) a policy perspective  as to why and when they are created, 2) the tie into management reporting, and 3) using system functionality manage the volume .  How defined are your companies’ polices for creating plant maintenance orders with the respect to the usage of an order type and are there dollar value thresholds for different PM order types?  Then how does the policy tie this usage into the overall management reporting strategy?    In addition, there master data maintenance associated with orders takes time such as assigning the correct CO objects, creating settlement rules, and taking the order through the various statuses.  Numerous PM orders can create performance issues in executing order settlements, allocations with orders as receivers, order reporting (which is why as I ask about $ thresholds for creating an order).

Thus, your response speaks to part 3 of my question with respect to what can be done to lessen the burden of these types of orders.