If DP-supported maintenance is to be set up properly at a company, it is necessary to structure the existing technical systems on the basis of technical objects.

Advantages of structuring:

• The time required for managing the technical objects is reduced.

• Maintenance processing is simplified.

• The time spent entering data during maintenance processing is reduced considerably.

• More specific, thorough and faster evaluation of maintenance data.

You should allow sufficient time for planning the structure. Weigh up all the pros and cons for your company that each structuring approach will bring. Note that it takes longer to restructure objects later than it does to structure them in the first place.

Structuring your systems forms the basis for implementing the application components Plant Maintenance (PM) and Customer Service (CS).

Before you begin representing technical objects in the system, you should be aware of the organization of maintenance planning within your company. You should focus primarily on the structure of the entire company. This involves defining correctly the maintenance plants and maintenance planning plants in your system.

The maintenance plant for a technical object is the plant at which it is installed.

The maintenance planning plant for a technical object is the plant in which the maintenance tasks for the object are planned and prepared. Maintenance planner groups work at the maintenance planning plant to plan and prepare the maintenance tasks for the plants that are assigned to the maintenance planning plant. The following activities are performed at the maintenance planning plant:

• Definition of task lists

• Material planning based on bills of material in task lists and orders

• Management and scheduling of maintenance plans

• Creation of maintenance notifications

• Execution of maintenance orders

The way in which you represent the organization of maintenance planning in your company depends on the structure of the entire company. You have three options:

• Centralized maintenance planning
• Decentralized maintenance planning
• Partially centralized maintenance planning

With centralized maintenance planning, you can have the following combinations of plants:

A The company comprises only one plant which is both maintenance plant and maintenance planning plant for all the technical objects.

B The company has several maintenance plants, however, only one plant in which maintenance planning is performed. The plant in which maintenance planning is performed is indicated in the system as the maintenance planning plant. All other plants are assigned to this plant as maintenance plants, for which the maintenance tasks must be planned in the maintenance planning plant.

The company comprises several maintenance plants. Each plant performs its own maintenance planning. In this case, all the plants in the system are indicated as maintenance planning plants.

The company comprises several maintenance plants. Some of the maintenance plants perform their own maintenance planning, others do not. The plants without their own maintenance planning are assigned to maintenance planning plants in which planning is also performed for them, whilst the plants in which maintenance planning is performed are indicated in the system as being maintenance planning plants.

Once you have represented the organizational structure of your company, you can choose between three different options for representing technical objects:

• Functional structuring (only functional locations)
• Object-related structuring (only equipment)
• Combination (equipment at functional locations)

With this type of structuring, you subdivide your technical system into functional locations. For example, when you subdivide a production line into functional locations, you can represent the individual function units as functional locations in the system.

If you use functional locations when structuring your technical system, you can also take into account the process-oriented or spatial structure of the system.

With this type of structuring, you subdivide your technical system into pieces of equipment. A piece of equipment is an individual, physical object that is to be maintained independently, and that can be installed in a technical system or part of a technical system.

You can combine object-related structuring using pieces of equipment with functional structuring using functional locations. In this case, the pieces of equipment are installed at functional locations (installation/dismantling of individual objects at a functional location).

• The functional location represents the site where the technical tasks are performed.

• The piece of equipment represents the object with which the technical tasks are performed.

Within damage analysis, you will then be able to recognize, for example, whether or not damage occurring repeatedly is linked to the usage site, or is specific to the objects made by a particular manufacturer.

For more information, see:

When you perform structuring from a technical perspective, you assign the technical objects of the system to particular object classes (equipment, functional location and assembly classes).

You can use this type of structuring in addition to structuring from a functional and/or object-related perspective.