Why Good Notification Is Important

By Kristina Gordon, DuPont

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Maintenance work orders in SAP usually always begin with a notification. This is the critical piece of data that identifies what the problem is, who is reporting it, the equipment or area that requires work, and the priority level. A complete and well-written work notification that includes all required and detailed information increases accuracy and productivity in these areas:

• work planning
• material sourcing
• scheduling
• work accomplishment
• documentation.

These elements ultimately facilitate and enable a stringent reliability program.

Use transaction IW21 to create a notification. The first step is to enter the notification type.  This can be configured by your organization or you can use one of the pre-designed notification types. These normally consist of a request and a breakdown or an activity report. Once you have entered the notification type, you can click enter or the green check to begin filling out the request. The boxes highlighted on screen shot 1 show what typically are your required fields. Giving a good description, along with who is reporting the problem and what the priority is (emergency or urgent) will help the coordinator when converting the notification to a work order.

Use the appropriate field to identify whether the work order involves a specific piece of equipment.

Selecting the appropriate failure mode is critical to work-order completion. The failure mode will help the mechanic determine or begin to correct the problem reported. Failure modes are configured by your organization and correspond to the equipment.

All work identification begins with filling out the notification as completely and with as much information as can be provided. This will help expedite correction of the problem and save down time. EP

Kristina Gordon is SAP PM Leader, DuPont Protective Solutions Business, and SAP WMP Champion, Spruance Site, Richmond, VA. If you have SAP questions, send them to editors@efficientplantmag.com and we’ll forward them to Kristina.