Maintenance Strategy 

Definition

A maintenance strategy defines the rules for the sequence of planned maintenance work. It contains general scheduling information, and can therefore be assigned to as many maintenance task lists (PM task lists) and maintenance plans as required. A maintenance strategy contains maintenance packages in which the following information is defined:

• The cycle in which the individual work should be performed (for example, every two months, every 3,106.86 miles, every 500 operating hours)

From Release 4.0A, maintenance strategies are optional. If you want to perform simple preventive maintenance in your company, for which one maintenance cycle is sufficient, then you can work with single cycle plans. In contrast, you use strategy plans to show complex maintenance cycles.

You create some maintenance plans with a maintenance strategy. The following table shows which maintenance plan types require a maintenance strategy.

Maintenance Plan Type	Maintenance Strategy
Single cycle plan, time-based	No
Single cycle plan, performance-based	No
Strategy plan, time-based	Yes
Strategy plan, performance-based	Yes
Multiple counter plan	No

If you want to use time-based or performance-based strategy plans in your company, you must first define

• Where regular maintenance is required (shown in the system as a maintenance item)

• The frequency of these maintenance tasks in terms of performance or time (shown in the system as maintenance packages)

For this, you must compare the legal requirements, manufacturer recommendations and costs of preventive maintenance with the cost of a breakdown. You should also consider how you can set up the tasks in a maintenance plan, so that scheduling and maintenance activities are combined most effectively.

Once you have determined the optimum cycles for preventive maintenance, you can define a suitable maintenance strategy. Using the PM application component, you can create strategies which represent the scheduling rules for all the preventive maintenance tasks required within your company. As these strategies contain general scheduling information, they can be assigned to as many different maintenance plans as required.

By using maintenance strategies containing general scheduling information, you can:

• Reduce maintenance plan creation time

• Name of the strategy
• Short text

The scheduling parameters (for example, call horizon, shift factor) contain the scheduling data for the respective maintenance strategy, with which you can influence the scheduling of maintenance plans. When you create a strategy plan, the system copies this data to the plan where you can change it.

• Time-based (for example, every 30 days)

• Time-based by key date (for example, every 30 days on the 30th day of the month)

• Time-based by factory calendar (for example, every 30 working days)

• Performance-based (for example, every 50 operating hours)

Maintenance activities that must be performed at a particular date or point in time are combined into maintenance packages. These contain, for example, the cycle duration and unit of measurement. For more information, see Maintenance Packages.

If you work with hierarchies for packages and several packages are due on the same date, note that one year and twelve months are considered to be of different length in the SAP System.

1 year = 365 days; 12 months = 360 days (12 x 30)

For strategy plans, you can assign a maintenance task list if necessary to a maintenance item in the strategy plan which describes the maintenance tasks to be performed in its operations. The same strategy must be specified in the maintenance task list as in the strategy plan. This means that you can assign the maintenance packages of the assigned maintenance strategy to individual operations in the maintenance task list. For example, you assign the maintenance package "every 6,213.71 miles" to the operation "oil change".

Through the assignment of maintenance packages to operations, you define the frequency (in this case, every 6,213.71 miles) in which the operations should be performed. For more information, see Assignment of Task Lists to the Maintenance Item.

Changing a Maintenance Strategy.