Date Determination

When you are processing issues and 8D problem analyses, you can get the system to determine the dates for the date fields that need to be filled. To do this, you store a date schema in Customizing for QIM that contains the required offsets between the various date fields.

Which date schema is used depends on the issue type. You can assign a default date schema to an issue type and store a BRFplus decision table for a more fine-grained determination of the date schema. If a date schema is found by the BRFplus determination, this has precedence over the default date schema.

Prerequisites

You make the settings for date schemas in Customizing for QIM under Start of the navigation path Issue Processing Next navigation step Urgency Make Settings for Date Determination and Traffic Lights End of the navigation path .

You edit the BRFplus decision table for determining the date schema in the System Administration work center under Configure Rules). For more information, see Determination of Date Schemas for Issues Using BRFplus.

Features

The dates that can be determined for an issue include the date fields for the issue itself and for the assigned activities. Here, you can have the system determine the various date fields dependent on another date field or dependent on the creation date if you specify the offset between the date fields (timepoint codes) in the Customizing settings for the date schema. For example, you can specify that the expected start date of all activities of a specific activity type must always lie two hours after the creation date of the issue. A negative offset is also possible, so you can define, for example, that the expected end date of an activity lies two days before the requested end of the issue.

Note Note

Note that the offset is calculated exactly to the second. The system does not take a factory calendar into account and thus does not make allowance for weekends and public holidays.

End of the note.

For each timepoint code, that is for each date field, you can specify whether the system should overwrite all entries, only initial date fields (blank fields), or only those fields that were filled by the system in an earlier date determination run. This allows you to make sure that the system does not overwrite dates that a user entered manually.

Activities

You trigger date determination when processing an issue using the Determine Dates pushbutton.
The system checks which date schema is to be used and runs a date determination.
So you can check the results, the changes are stored in a log.
You can view all logs for date determination for an issue when you are processing or displaying the issue by using the Date Determination Log pushbutton.