SAP PM Interview Questions

SAP Plant Maintenance application component provides organization with a tool for all maintenance activities to be performed. All the activities that are performed under maintenance are interconnected and hence this module is closely integrated with other modules- Production Planning, Material Management, and Sales and Distribution.

This module is closely integrated with other modules- Production Planning, Material Management, and Sales and Distribution, Controlling, Customer Service.

You perform the following activities under Plant Maintenance −

Inspection

Inspection is done to check the actual condition of a technical system.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is used to maintain high availability of the technical system. It includes maintenance planning and work scheduling activities for technical objects.

Repair

Repair involves all measures that can be performed to restore the ideal condition. Repair process it is can be performed at many planning stages- like work scheduling, resource planning and initial costing, etc. and you can response immediately w.r.t to a damage events causing production shutdown. You can create required Purchase requisition, processed work orders to reduce the downtime.

Key Steps that are includes as part of Work Order Notification under SAP PM −

• Notification
• Newly Created Work Order
• Creation of Purchase request for work orders
• Purchase Order created and parts Received
• Parts issues to Work Order
• Approval and Planning of Work Order
• Scheduling and Releasing Work Order
• Work Order Execution
• Closing a Work Order

To effectively manage SAP Maintenance activities in an organization, you need to divide existing maintenance structure into technical objects. Technical objects are used to define the machine types that exists in an organization and using the object characteristics, you can further define other technical objects.

Maintenance plant for a technical object is known as plant in which you perform the maintenance tasks for the objects and planning is done. You can perform the following activities in Maintenance Planning Plant −

• Defining Task list as per maintenance plan
• As per BOM in task list, you perform material planning.
• Management and scheduling of maintenance plans
• Maintenance Orders creation and execution

As per the structure of the company, maintenance planning can be performed. You define the tasks under maintenance planning as per the structure and defined technical objects. Following types of maintenance planning is possible −

• Centralized Maintenance Planning
• Decentralize Maintenance Planning
• Partially Centralize Maintenance Planning

Centralize Maintenance Planning

Within an organization, centralize planning supports following structures −

There is only one plant for all the technical objects which is maintenance planning plant and maintenance plant.

In other scenario, it is possible that a company has multiple maintenance plants and one plant is there in which maintenance planning is performed. All other plants has this plants as maintenance planning plant in which all activities are performed and this plant is indicated as maintenance planning plant in the system.

As per above example −

Plants 001, 002

Maintenance Plants 001, 002

Maintenance Planning Plant 002

Plants assigned to maintenance planning plant 001

Decentralize Maintenance Planning

In this scenario, company consists of multiple plants and each plant acts as its own maintenance planning plant and in SAP system all plants are mentioned as maintenance planning plant.

Plants 001, 002

Maintenance Plants 001,002

Maintenance planning plants 001, 002

In this structuring, you divide your technical system in to pieces known as equipment. An equipment is an individual object which can be placed in a technical system or part of technical system.

In this type of structure, you divide your technical system as per functional locations. With the division of product line into functional locations, individual unit can act as functional locations in the system.

An equipment is known as an individual object in the system that is maintained independently. Equipment can be installed at different functional locations. You can create individual equipment in an organization based on Object based structure of a technical system.

Using equipment you can perform following functions in the system −

• You can manage individual data from a maintenance perspective in SAP system.

• You can perform individual maintenance tasks for each technical object in the system

• You can use this to maintain a record of all the maintenance tasks performed for a technical object.

• In case you want to see data for an object for a longer time, you can use equipment master record for the same.

In case of breakdown, you should represent an object as Technical Object if it is repaired. When you define an object as Technical object, you can maintain service history of the object in system. Note that you can’t change the equipment number once it is created in the system. If you have entered an incorrect number mistakenly you need to achieve this to change it.

When you are using multiple piece of equipment you need to classify the equipment to perform a qick search.

When you exchange an object in case of breakdown due to its low value and in this case you don’t need to maintain service history. For each functional location, you have to define a structure indicator as mentioned in previous topic. When you maintain a functional location in another functional location, you can’t store the installation location history.

To make changes to equipment master record- There is possibility that data has been changed, or you mistakenly enter wrong data, and you have to change the master record.

T-Code: IE02

It is possible to transfer master data from one functional location to other functional location or between functional location and piece of equipment.

Using data transfer function, you can maintain data at superior level in hierarchical structure or you can also maintain data for objects assigned to functional locations.

Hierarchical data transfer

In Hierarchical structure, you can maintain data at high level and system will automatically transfer the changes to below level.

Horizontal data transfer

Using horizontal data transfer, you can transfer data from reference location to functional location or from functional location to piece of equipment.

The milestone confirmation is a special form of confirmation, in which the confirmation of one operation causes other operations or sub operations to be automatically confirmed at the same time.

Milestones are operations that have the corresponding indicator in the control key.

Operations can be defined as milestone operations in their control keys. If a milestone operation is confirmed, then previous operations are automatically confirmed.

Yes, T-Code: IE02

Item number is used to identify the material component that is to be used for an operation in the maintenance order. It is generally given in increments of 0010.It is the first field in the Components tab of a maintenance order.

In SAP PM, when there is a malfunction occurs for any of the equipment which requires a response from Maintenance team. The process of correcting this situation is known as Breakdown maintenance.

Breakdown maintenance, it is required in following situations −

In breakdown maintenance, equipment is not working properly.

In breakdown maintenance, production is effected when a technical equipment went breakdown.

PM02

The corrective maintenance contains all the process steps that are involved in preventive maintenance and regular maintenance process. Using corrective maintenance, following functions can be performed under Plant Maintenance −

• Plant Maintenance user can enter a notification in SAP System to request maintenance and to repair defective equipment.

• Maintenance planner can create, plan, and schedule a maintenance work order in the system.

• Work order is received by the technician and enter the information.

• An authorized person in PM system approves and completes the work as per the work order.

In Preventive maintenance, routine checks are performed as per company’s maintenance strategy to ensure that machines are running as per the required parameters. In SAP PM, using routine maintenance plans you create a preventive work order.

In Corrective Maintenance, you correct a malfunction or a machine failure by raising a notification in the system. Work order is received by the technician and enter the information. An authorized person in PM system approves and completes the work as per the work order.

In certain scenarios, a corrective work order is created as a result of preventive work order when a routine checkup is performed, technician finds a failure or a malfunction in operating machine and a corrective work order is created to clear the fault.

PM03 is for performing Preventive maintenance.

You perform a Corrective maintenance to improve the working condition of the machine. It is performed when a malfunction is detected and machine is not operating properly as per designated function.

Breakdown maintenance is carried out when your equipment has a breakdown and not working. In Breakdown maintenance, production is affected. In SAP system PM02 order type is used to perform Breakdown Maintenance.

Preventive Maintenance in an organization is used to avoid system breakdown and to avoid production breakdown. Using Preventive maintenance, you can achieve various benefits in your company. Preventive maintenance term is used to perform inspections, preventive maintenance and repairs. Maintenance plans are used to define dates and the extent of preventive and inspection maintenance tasks which can be planned for technical objects.

Task list in Preventive Maintenance is defined as the sequence of activities that are performed as part of Preventive Maintenance in an organization. They are used to perform repeated tasks as part of Preventive Maintenance and to perform them efficiently.

Using Task lists, you can reduce the effort by standardizing the work sequence. All the updates are performed at one specific spot in the corresponding maintenance task list and all the maintenance orders and maintenance items in the system receive the updated status of work sequences. With help of task lists, it helps in reducing the effort required to create maintenance Orders and maintenance Items as you can refer back to Task list to see the work sequences.

All the schedule activities include inspection, maintenance and repairs come under Planned Maintenance. In Plant Maintenance, you define the time intervals when the work steps has to be executed and work sequences in which they have to be executed.

Task list for ongoing maintenance contains the work sequences based on current inspection. All inspection that is done without a regular schedule comes under ongoing maintenance.

Maintenance planning component is integrated with different components of other modules and subcomponent in Plant Maintenance −

• Maintenance task lists
• Maintenance orders
• Maintenance notifications
• Work Clearance Management

Maintenance plan defines the schedule and list of tasks to be performed under Maintenance Planning. A Maintenance plan can be created as per company’ work like different objects can be maintained on different dates and scope can be different as per the object type.

Following procedures can be used to create Preventive Maintenance Plan −

• Single Cycle Plan
• Strategy Plan
• Multiple Counter plan
• Maintenance plan for service procurement
• Maintenance plan for an outline agreement

No

Single cycle maintenance plan is used to define exactly one time-based or performance-based maintenance cycle, in which you specify the interval at which the maintenance plan should be executed. It is one of the simplest maintenance plan used for Maintenance planning.

Example

A single cycle maintenance plan- annual maintenance of a car or service of a Printer after 1 million copies.

A multiple counter plan can be created without a maintenance strategy and is used for performance based maintenance. In the multiple counter plan you create maintenance cycles and allocate counters of equipment or functional locations with different dimensions to them.

In live scenarios, you use multiple counter plan for the individual activities or for the individual groups of activities.

A multiple counter plan can be created without a maintenance strategy and is used for performance based maintenance. In the multiple counter plan you create maintenance cycles and allocate counters of equipment or functional locations with different dimensions to them.

In live scenarios, you use multiple counter plan for the individual activities or for the individual groups of activities.

Example

Multiple Counter plan is suited for the airline industry. You can capture where dimensions like inspections of the landing gear should depend on the number of kilometers flown and the number of take-offs, etc.

Using Maintenance plan with outline agreement, it allows you to simplify the processing of services as per the outline agreement for different objects. When you create a maintenance plan with an outline agreement, following maintenance call objects are created −

• Service Notification
• Service Order

Eqiup. Category Q

T-Code: KP26

Using MEB in SAP Plant Maintenance, you can easily manage the maintenance planning consists of work packages. The capacity of work centers are shown in graphical manner and you can use new planning tree for displaying capacity view of planning board.

Using Maintenance Event Builder MEB, you can plan smaller maintenance projects in the form of individual work packages.

MEB is technically a workbench and it supports the following functions −

• To see backlog- worklist of notifications.
• To bundle the notifications for revisions.
• To create orders from notifications.
• To assign the orders.
• To display open work requirements, orders or due dates.

Refurbishment is defined as process to repair spare parts and to return the spare parts to warehouse or to the equipment. You can define a Refurbishment order as Maintenance order by which you can execute the process of refurbishing damaged equipment and to perform this you need a material and Serial # combination.

As part of Refurbishment process, you can uninstall the damaged equipment or material from the maintenance plant and this is moved to Warehouse using movement type 101. A Refurbishment order is created to collect the cost for the refurbishment process.

Once Refurbishment process is completed, you change the conditional state of material from damaged to Refurbished state. The Refurbished equipment can be reinstalled in the maintenance plant and order is closed.

Movement type 101

Key Steps in Refurbishment process −

• Uninstall the damaged Equipment from the Maintenance Plant.
• Movement type 101, to move the material to Warehouse.
• Creation of Refurbishment order to collect cost for the refurbishment activity.
• When Refurbishment process is executed, state of material is changed from damaged to Refurbished.
• Reinstallation of equipment in the Maintenance plant.

Warranty claim processing function in Plant Maintenance is used to handle large number of claims automatically. This module is developed to meet the needs of vendors, supplier, and manufacturers for all type of products. Warranty claim processing is complex process cos of length of service, age of product or to perform different checks in claim processing.

Warranty claim processing component is closely integrated with Material Management, Sales and distribution, Customer Service and other processes of Plant Maintenance.

Using mobile application enterprise asset management, you can perform maintenance processing on any mobile device. Using Enterprise Asset management on Mobile devices, filed service technicians can access all the work related information on their mobile devices.

You can perform order processing and notification processing using mobile end devices. Various functions w.r.t Notifications can be performed on mobile devices −

• Display a Notification List
• Display a Notification
• Create a new Notification
• Create a Notification with reference from Order, technical object or for a Functional Location.
• Change a Notification

• Task Category
• Technical specifications of the system
• Organization within the maintenance department
• Employee skills and education

Cross Application Timesheet component is a tool used for recording time and tasks in Plant Maintenance. Employees can record their own data and hence ease the administration workload.

• Maintenance Manager
• Maintenance Supervisor
• Maintenance Planner
• Maintenance Engineer
• Technician

Equipment Task List

Functional Location Task List

• Information Structure
• Standard Analysis
• Characteristics and Key Figures
• MTTR/MTBR