Looking at some of the other threads, there is some discussion on where work history should be held.
I am used to raising notifications and creating work orders from these, with the work order type denoting breakdown, planned or preventative activity.
For time confirmations we use IW42 to record the time, but here we also have the capabilty to record confirmation text ( which can be reviewed in IW47).
What are peoples experience of where activity is recorded?, I have used SAP in 3 major blue chip organisations and each does it slightly different.

Confirmation text is good but do you use the object part, damage and cause codes as well?

SAP data type its separate to notification and order.

When you need to analyze time to repair, you must collect the time in Order that you have used, If you need to analyze failure or time to failure or time between failure, you must collect malfunction start and end in Notification and also failure information as Josh said.

Please look each tab page in Notification and proper configuration to support you.

I am fine with using the codes in both the order and notification and have had catagorys set up for these by asset type. These can give good breakdown analysis information, Failure modes and metrics( MTBF, MTTR etc..)
However my query is more for actual text entered by the craftsman detailing what he has actually done to resolve the issue. This is to be used for handover reports and historical records. This allows more information regarding what was done to resolve the issues, or to what point an investigation has been reached. Does best practice show this should be entered in the notification or against the work order time confirmation text?

In the WO confirmation text I think better so that the cratfmen don't have to click any extra steps.

We prefer the notification long text as the official location of the the detailed descriptions of all the work activities. This gives us a clean place to denote all observations and pass on information either to the next shift... or to the reliability groups when they review.. the same day or 6 months later.

We utilize CATS for time entry and the configuration that the craftsmen use for entering time has been modified to include the notification for the job to which they are posting time. Therefore, when they are entering time...they simply click on the notification and finish filling out the details.. then they can continue putting in time or go to the next notification.

We also have a custom transaction that queries the notifications and prints a log type output for passing on information to improve communications throughout the plant.

Screen_shot.doc (176 Kb, 36 downloads) Notification, CAT2, and shift report

We used notification long text for some recommend from engineer also, but if you need to follow up after the task have been done, I suggest to use tab page "Task" that provide you to input what activity to accomplish or what the follow up task that you might follow.

//For the confirmation text, we use for any variance from a plan that input from technician and provide a good information for planner to be revise for the next plan.

We use activities tab to record work done by the Mechanic, simple codes such as replaced, adjusted, calibrated etc can be set up to record activities, and short/long text can be added. The advantage of recording history here instead of confirmation text is that its available from IH01 history searches from multi level lists etc. You can have multiple activities in one notification. We have a custom report that lists all notifications with header text, activity text and notification & order status.

Other coding such as damage/cause etc supplement this.

list_of_notifications_with_text.doc (135 Kb, 33 downloads) screen shot of report

I would never recommend using the text in the order confirmation slot for work carried out unless you are not using notifications.
For handover notes, it means you are entering data in the notification and entering it in the time confirmation text as well.
It might be easier for the tech going off shift, but the oncoming shift have to read that text and look at the notification as well.
When you want to look at work history for the equipment using the history button on the equipment, it takes you to the notification(s)
As you can see from the majority of responses, most companies use the codes and code groups and dates associated with the notification and I believe that adheres to the best practice.

The other aspect to this topic worth considering is which transaction your work supervisors or planners use to view the work list at various stages of work completion. I mention this because you can use to good effect the column in the layout which indicates whether long text is present or not. In IW28 this indicates whether notification long text is present, however in IW37n it indicates whether operation long text is present. This will highlight to anyone who overviews the work that additional comments have been logged which they may wish to review. On a recent project we actually used the work order header long text to record comments because this made the entry process as simple as possible.