Currently our planners generate a weekly schedule that has orders sorted or listed in a numeric series. This has the net result of showing the days of the week aspect all over the place. As a Operator and non-programmer I am tasked with reviewing this list and doing basically another sort (by hand) that culls out various jobs that have a minimal impact from an operational perspective, and looking for those items that will require us to lock out equipment or that have other operational considerations that require some type of operational reconfiguration of our mechanical systems. Once I have this sub-list, I then hand type in the jobs in to a WORD document that is then passed to the operating shifts to facilitate timely shutdown and locking out of our equipment. I work in a power plant.
For example: I cull out all of the lubrication route jobs, since the lube person will fill up equipment without shutting down or even conferring with operations and there is typically no impact to the operation.
On the other hand an annual PM of one of our Feedwater Pumps which takes a week to accomplish, will need to be locked out on Sunday night and will require other pumps to be brought on line and operated for the affected week. Due to the numeric order sort this job may be well down in the list, even though it may be the very first order done that week.
Are there alternative ways of either generating the SAP report and/or bringing the information in to WORD or Excel. Time, I've got. Money is virtually nonexistent to make this happen if it is able to be done. My programming skills are little better than adding 2+2 in Visual Basic. I can provide examples of the current SAP schedule and my WORD document if needed to visually demonstrate what we are doing by hand.
Thanks for the help,
Wayne

Wayne,
The planners can include the start dates, sorted in ascending order in a separate column in their download from SAP. Alternately have the report sent in Excel which may be easier to manipulate the data.

Greg

They are printing the reports internally from an SAP report. Where can I find the information on how to export to Excel or WORD? If I can get it in Excel, I suspect my problems will go away

Wayne,

I would be looking at using the System Condition field in SAP to identify the orders/operations which require special preparation. This field can be specified on the order header and/or to each operation. Our company has defined the following options for this field:
Blank No effect on system
F Full operation (For tasks where the equipment MUST be operating at the time)
I Isolated
L Limited operation
S Shutdown

As for the configuration of the display you can customise the layout of the list to show your preferred fields and the sort order you desire. You can define any number of layouts and switch betweeen them to suit your purpose.

To download to Excel you should find an icon at the top of your list for this purpose. In an Order or Operation List Display there is an icon which looks like a calculator which will download list to Excel.

Wayne,

I would agree with the line of thought David is suggesting...
How do the planners currently indicate on the work orders that a job requires some level of production support / setup?

Do the work orders have some standard reference (parameter) for jobs that require either a process or subsystem to be offline?

If you have this in place and you have access to at least some display functions in SAP, then you should be able query and filter as needed... and hopefully export to excel any list you need.

for example... our system is configured to be able to use the system condition field as David stated.
Ours has only 3 options...
Running (Work can be performed anytime without impact to production)
Down (Work can only be performed when the process is down. Normal scheduled Maintenance)
Outage (Work can only be performed when process is down for an extended period. >24hrs)

The thought was to use this field for grouping work items together by this category and then other parameters such as planning group, plant section, and work center could be used to further segregate work packages...

In practice, we have been using the revision funtionality to accomplish this.
We have a revision for all of the work scheduled next week for items that will occur during the scheduled maintenance time period (Down) and we have a revision for all the work next week that can be accomplished at anytime next week (Running).
In addition, we have a revision(s) built for the next major outage(s)/shutdown(s).

That's probably more than you were asking for... As David said, you should have an icon for exporting...if not you may try the key combination (Shift + F4).

Steven

I can see that we have a long way to go here.
Currently, our planners are running a report that goes by the name of "ZNE1146_PRINTWEEK" which they then take and HAND MARK with a HIGHLIGHTER, their "best guess" as to which jobs they think will require some sort of shutting down and locking out to facilitate the job.
I opened up SAP and I can see the field you all are referencing, "System Condition". It currently has two selections available. "In Operation"and "Not In Operation". If I get the gist of your conversation, these fields can be added to? My guess would be that the operations folks (Me) would like the
I Isolated
L Limited operation
S Shutdown
selections to use your example. Currently, the report is full of PM's, and "Standing Orders" that just clutter up the list needlessly.
Can I assume that if we were to use the field "System Condition" and list only the mentioned codes along with a sort on day of the week this might generate a better list.
Is there a book, manual, or tutorial somewhere that could walk me through this from start to finish. I get the general idea of where you are going with this, but it would sure be nice if I could sit down and walk my way through the process from start to finish. I am able to "see" the system condition field on an individual order, but once I get to the list that is exportable to EXCEL, it is gone so I am unable to sort appropriately.
As can probably be inferred from my highlighting with a magic marker comment, I am on my own here.
Thanks,
Wayne

Wayne,

Not sure about tutorials, manuals to walk you through this. There are plenty of books on the market. Here is a quick guide that I hope will help.
Once you have the list, I am assuming via IW38 or 39 and have selected the correct Plant, Main Work Center, Dates etc and executed the search you should see the "Current" icon it has 3 little boxes stepped down over another square (probably next to the ∑ icon) or else Ctrl + F8
This will bring up the Change Layout box, a tip, click on the Column Name box under Column Set and this will put all of the items below in alphabetical order. Find “System Condition” or any other fields you want to see and drag them to the left column and place where you require it to be positioned. Click on the Save tab and give this new layout a name and save it as your Default Setting, Click on the Green Tick.
Once you have this you can arrange the data columns further by highlighting them and dragging it right or left.
Sort in ascending or descending order by highlighting the column you require and clicking on the icons (just to the left of the calculator one that will export to excel)
Once the data is how you would like it, export as David has explained and be sure to save the file.
Next time you run the search ensure you have entered your desired "Layout" at the bottom of the List Edit page. You can even save this as variant, click the Save button and give it a name etc.
Hope this has helped.
Greg

Take it easy! no printing out or we called paperless conceptual.

Our practice, planner do the job plan by create job step (SAP called Operation) then specific date each step, called schedule date(specific must start on and must finish on in each step) first step in Order may be Isolate System that prepare by operation guy, next step to repair or any method to restore equipment back in service by maintenance guy! (We have Work center both maintenance and operation guys)

After they have commitmented job can be accomplish. Each team use IW37 to monitoring task or step that must be performed.

I hope my practice can be help.

Hi wsquared,

Indeed there are several ways to set your priorities, it all depends on your Maintenance and Integrity philosophy. David has suggested how you could configure your SAP to give you the desired attention on the esentials, you could also go the route of Compliance categories for PM activities. GIW has further explained how you can optimize further from a simple user point of view and those are excellent ways to achieve what you want to do based on the assumption that Technical authorities within your organization indeed believe the settings are what your business needs to focus on. As for Panuphan's suggestion, that is in the area of scheduling the already planned jobs already pulled into focus. You could use different means that may include the planning board, etc to define sequence of job execution and not neccessarily only on prioritization and normally done at the operations level whereas the earlier is done at work order level except of course where operations represent actual work packages that have work steps attached to it or refering to an external procedure. I'll advise you try setting the desired variants in line with David / GIW's steers.

There are several very good suggestion in the post. Some more complicated than others. It is important that your Preventative Maintenance program's infrastructure is solid. What I mean by that is that all "jobs" are well defined. Including your maintenance planner/scheduler and preventative maintenance program's administrator (two seperate entities). Also the Tasks and Maintenance Plans need to set up properly in SAP, with all the indicators in place (work centers, call horizons, maintenance activity types etc...). Use the tasks lists and operations to their full potencial. When preparations need to be make in order to complete a PM, like an annual as you stated, write other task list (maint plans) to call in advance. I have several that are just reminders, so I can order parts and schedule contractors. As for scheduling this is a separate issue. What are your work center capacities ?

If you'd like, I can do a quick demo using a web meeting to show you how do improve the sort and filtering functionality and exporting to Excel.
Call 919-341-2733