Attend Mastering SAP Plant Maintenance at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia on November 19 – 21. This event offers a vibrant and thriving community where Maintenance and Reliability people have important conversations, form lasting relationships and pinpoint new and different ways to use SAP EAM/PM tools to get business results.  The Effective Planning and Scheduling track will review leading scheduling tools such as GWOS and assembling standard work packages with task lists, materials and documents.

Work with our experts at the event in Booth #14 to see how our solutions improve EAM/PM results – schedule an appointment today.

View more conference details on the Mastering SAP PM website.

All manufacturers are faced with a common challenge — how to keep plants producing at maximum output while conducting predictive and preventive maintenance. By being proactive and planning preventative maintenance; companies can greatly reduce the cost of lost opportunities and maximize revenue.

Prometheus Plant Maintenance Advanced offers Plant Maintenance solutions to maximize revenue in the SAP PM module through:

- Graphical work order scheduling
- Work order printing packages
- Easy material searches
- Work order modification en masse
- User/role specific entry screen to access any transaction

Join us to see how these solutions will help reduce screen time for personnel up to 60%, improve long range planning and maximize revenue.

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Axpo, a Swiss provider of energy and energy-related services, recently deployed Prometheus Group’s Web GWOS solution at one of their nuclear power plants and they shared photos of the solution roll-out with us. Prometheus Group’s development and implementation teams worked closely with Axpo’s project team to customize the Web GWOS solution for their specific business requirements.

Axpo had successfully used the Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS) and saw the opportunity to improve communication across the teams with a web version.  They wanted to have real-time updates of the plan posted to screens on the plant floor. Working closely with Axpo’s project team, Prometheus consultants were able to create a customized solution that provides greater visibility of maintenance scheduling for operations and a simplified view of weekly and daily plans.

“Ideally, Axpo was looking for a solution that was straight-forward and easy to use, and they wanted it to be embedded in their intranet portal so it would be easily accessible from the plant floor” recalls Will Tatum, one of the Prometheus Consultant’s working on the project. Some of the customization that Axpo required meant new development for Prometheus, and in less than 5 months, Prometheus was able to build a customized solution that harnessed the functionality of GWOS and provided the look and feel Axpo desired from a web-based solution.

IM The project team and the plant manager

The Project Manager explains the various aspects of Web GWOS

The newly inaugurated system is examined with interest!

So you’re a GWOS user and you’ve got maintenance execution under control, kudos! But what about maintenance strategy? How do you forecast capacity? Can you simulate your maintenance capacity for a year? Are PM’s delayed, orders closed, or not executed? Do you have trouble scheduling your PM’s around shutdowns and outages?

Excuses are common when it comes to avoiding preventive maintenance, including the old adage “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” One of the challenges of maintaining equipment in the plant maintenance environment is that it can be a time consuming process to plan and schedule these activities. For example, a company will often purchase many of the same types of equipment, such as a fleet of vehicles of the same make and model. Each individual piece of equipment would likely require an identical maintenance plan. However, in standard SAP PM there is no way to create a maintenance plan using an existing plan as a reference. Users would have to rely on third-party tools to manage this process, which impacts data credibility along with additional time-consuming manual tasks.

We’re all thinking it; there needs to be an easier way to ensure preventive maintenance! Enter the Preventive Maintenance Management suite from Prometheus. This video demonstrates how you can forecast capacity so that you can:

• Get a jump start on equipment management by forecasting when materials will arrive, ensuring there’s adequate lead time, and using this visibility to accurately budget material costs (in a nutshell, reduce inventory costs)
• Determine proper frequency for maintenance plans and make adjustments without hassle
• Align maintenance plans and utilize task lists across multiple sites

We’re over the moon about these new products because they’re going to take your maintenance strategy to a whole new level by giving you a holistic view of maintenance activity. Please, let us know what you think! Want a personalized demo? Give us a shout! We’re here to help.

While SAP is the leading enterprise resource planning software of choice, it does come with its challenges—especially for plant maintenance users. The SAP module for scheduling and assigning resources is not intuitive, requiring users to navigate multiple screens and make changes one work order at a time. To get the maximum value out of your SAP investment, it is vital that organizations improve user adoption by implementing a simple and intuitive scheduling tool.

The Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS) gives SAP PM Users the ability to visually inspect and graphically schedule work orders in a Gantt chart view from inside of SAP. By eliminating the confusing process of completing multiple SAP transactions to accomplish a simple task, GWOS helps your workforce become more efficient. Data is simultaneously displayed in tabular format for detailed analysis, as well as graphically for scheduling overviews. The result is a better, simpler, faster, and more cost effective plant maintenance operation.

This video explains the layout of the GWOS tool and provides instruction on how to create work orders and relationships using drag and drop functionality, auto-level work schedules to control capacity, and mass change work orders and user status.

You guys asked how to change the stoplight colors to indicate capacity in the Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS), our SAP scheduling tool for plant maintenance. Check out this video by GWOS expert, Bill Edwards, for a step-by-step tutorial on how to personalize the stoplight colors in GWOS to reflect resource capacity.

Why is capacity important? Over-extending your workforce can lead to confusion and missed opportunities on the plant floor. Likewise, under-scheduling resources can negatively affect production.

Here’s how to get capacity right:

What would you like to see in our next tips and tricks video? Please leave your suggestions in the comment section below.

A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.

Ballance Agri-Nutrients

Ballance Agro-Nutrients found the Print Manager solution to be a huge time saver. They deployed the solutions in less than three weeks. Users were able to get hands-on training with product experts which helped the user adoption process.

Besides greater usability, the company is expecting to claim savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in just printing benefits alone. The efficiency improvement it saw in printing alone was more than enough to justify the purchase for the entire Plant Maintenance suite. Along the way, users quickly became accustomed to the full capabilities of the solution beyond printing.

Leading European Paper Company

Since the installation of GWOS, the company has seen noticeable improvement in its planning and scheduling processes, which has helped company leaders to make better decisions about the company’s future. The main benefit of the GWOS solution was that it provided the company with a real-time scheduling tool that showed different time views.

For example, a scheduler can see what work orders have been scheduled in the future on a weekly and monthly basis, which was not possible in standard SAP. The company is now able to make better long term decisions for scheduling and planning – helping the company to maximize its resources.

Another benefit of GWOS was that users were able to do their jobs faster and more efficiently. User adoption of SAP improved greatly because users appreciated the simplicity of the drag and drop functionality and the Gantt chart view. Users were also able save time planning and scheduling because they no longer had to navigate through several screens in SAP.

Energy Company

This energy company desired a tool that would work within their existing SAP infrastructure while requiring minimal customization. So, additional functionality was built in to the GPSS solution according to end users’ specific requirements to better ensure flexibility and end user approval. But even then, the installation was quick and lasted less than two weeks. Users were trained on how to use Prometheus solutions based on the company’s existing shutdown requirements and were able to quickly grasp the simple interface.

The PS Advanced solution was able to work directly in the company’s SAP System with no additional middleware required. Users were able to utilize the WBS Shutdown Structure to link maintenance work orders and operations to the GPSS and SAP Project Systems. This provided an enormous benefit to the company because the new structure helped show work hours planned, as well as the actuals, against the work centers and work order operations. In other words, the company was able to see real-time project tracking in SAP.

Users noted the simplicity of the Prometheus solution, which made using the software much easier compared to its existing shutdown processes that required inefficient spreadsheets and use of third-party systems.

Newcrest Mining

Newcrest’s Maintenance Process Specialist, Craig Thompson says the company chose the Prometheus Group work scheduler because it integrates tightly with its core SAP management system and because it presents detailed information in a way that is easy to digest and alter.

“With Prometheus you get a graphical view of the maintenance to be executed over the week. You are presented with a Gantt chart of work orders which can be easily altered by simply dragging and dropping the task into a new time slot.” 

Before assigning a person to a task, the scheduler can quickly view their available capacity and the impact after the work is assigned to them. Thompson says this assists the scheduler to distribute the workload and enables them to assign a more realistic execution date.

 “With the scheduler linked automatically to HR calendars the task of producing accurate weekly schedules has become much simpler. Because the information is coming straight from SAP now, everyone views the same data and uses the schedules in the same way.”

European Building Materials Company

User adoption was reluctant at first at this European building materials company – a common reaction to moving to a new process. But after providing training and reinforcement that the solution was “worth the user’s time,” users were able to see the benefits of using Prometheus solutions. The company now has a “true planning board” with GWOS, which helps its business units have stronger alignment due to the increased visibility.

Since deployment, the company was able to see considerable gains in planning and scheduling efficiency, equipment availability increased, and spare parts consumption improved. For example, the company no longer had to use spreadsheets to transfer data and make updates, which improved data accuracy and helped users save time from having to complete duplicate tasks.

Another benefit was that the company was also able to utilize PM Advanced to manage small shutdowns at its European global sites. This was especially helpful for sites with maintenance schedulers who managed both routine maintenance as well as shutdowns because they could rely on one tool and a unified maintenance plan with tasks linked together.

The PM Advanced solution was deployed to additional sites without costly customization. This helped the company achieve its goal of better process alignment and consistent reporting across its global sites.

A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.

Sedgman

PM Advanced provided both a printing tool and a visual way for Sedgman’s users to schedule work orders in a Gantt chart format. The planning is more thorough and detailed, which improved the quality of the maintenance process. Training initiatives such as one-on-two sessions allowed users to understand more about how to use both SAP and Prometheus solutions to help them more efficiently use their time and provide a better output.

Each of Sedgman’s Australian sites has a shutdown every three weeks, with a twelve-hour window to complete all work. During the shutdown planning process, SAP revisions are used, and the Prometheus solution helps the company better manage this process, which includes the ability for users to clearly see the status of all shutdown purchase orders. By having a clear understanding of the schedule in SAP, work management has improved considerably.

Hemlock Semiconductor

Hemlock Semiconductor purchased PM Advanced to consolidate its plant maintenance systems and processes. Upon implementation, Hemlock integrated its HR and PM modules for all maintenance planning and scheduling. By consolidating all maintenance processes into one platform, they were able to dramatically improve process efficiency and reduce operational costs. In addition, the software solution has enabled Hemlock to respond rapidly to breaks in maintenance work and allowed for an unparalleled 20 hours of preventive maintenance to be scheduled.

Hemlock Semiconductor saved thousands of dollars by increasing plant maintenance efficiency and reducing its daily maintenance scheduling burden. By simplifying their complex SAP system, the company vastly improved efficiency and achieved its goal of 80% capacity planning, allocating an unprecedented 20% of its resources to immediate and disruptive work.

This was ground-breaking as little to no preventive maintenance was scheduled previously. And, by maintaining all data within SAP, Hemlock is now able to trust the information in SAP and eliminate the “silo effect” that once existed in the Plant Maintenance module. SAP users across the organization who are outside of the PM module can now track work orders, and executives can analyze and forecast costs; all from within SAP.

Century Aluminum

Within six months, Century Aluminum implemented Prometheus PM Advanced to consolidate its Plant Maintenance system and processes through all five facilities. 240 hours a year were saved annually due to custom KPIs.  And, Century’s planners were able to save more than hours per week thanks to a simplified user interface and ensured data integrity. The custom KPIs allowed planners and schedulers to get the most out of data pertaining to: total hours reported, breakdowns, unplanned hours, planned hours, schedule compliance, plant maintenance compliance, and plant maintenance hours.

The semi-automated Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS), which functions completely within SAP, provided Century Aluminum with a variety of options for organizing and assigning tasks quickly and accurately while displaying a Gantt chart that automatically refreshes with real-time updates. Furthermore, the auto-leveling functionality ensured workload capacity compliance and the mass change function allowed planners and schedulers to change user or system status on multiple work orders in one smooth, simple transaction.

The tool also allowed users to print all work orders and attach related documents in one compact step, thus saving countless hours and providing the option of printing multiple attachments at the same time. And, one-day training enabled users to feel comfortable with Prometheus PM Advanced. Training began with initial contact and continued beyond the implementation process to ensure an understanding of the solution and how it fits their business process.

OneSteel Steel and Recycling

While printing capability was a main driver for the Prometheus solution justification, OneSteel soon realized the value of having Prometheus tools such as the Navigator. One user said, “Navigator has been a huge success story for us. It really helps beginner SAP users or those who aren’t using SAP daily.” They set up the Navigator to reflect the actual process flow within the plant, ensuring stable processes and consistent results across all users. And, OneSteel made it even more intuitive by naming the buttons with a local descriptor such as “your orders”. Users were also enthusiastic about Mass Change, citing they saved 20 minutes per work order versus having to change each work order individually.

Overall, user acceptance of the Prometheus solutions was very positive. The company considered the Prometheus deployment a success based on how easily users embraced the tools and how the enhanced usability made planning and scheduling quicker. The company saw the planners’ adoption of SAP rise, as well as utilization of best practices improve. For example, OneSteel moved from the work order level to the operations level, creating more collaboration and visibility across the teams.  OneSteel was able to achieve its goal of improving consistency among all teams. One user described the Prometheus solutions as “an enabler to get everyone to follow one process.”

“In creating the business case for a new solution, the productivity improvements of SAP PM, when combined with the Prometheus suite of tools, were estimated at over $3.0M annually – for just one site.” How much can your company save? Check out our business case calculator.

Global Paper Production Company

Since the initial deployment of Prometheus solutions at this global paper company, user adoption has spread through several sites around the globe. The most popular tool among users is the Material Shopping Cart because its search functionality was significantly faster than what they were experiencing in standard SAP.

Print Manager and Material Shopping Cart have been deployed to nearly 150 sites, with 17 more deployments scheduled to occur by the end of 2013. GWOS and Mass Change have been deployed to 20 sites, with seven more deployments scheduled in 2013. To meet the needs of the company’s global work force, the solutions have been translated into five languages. The company has also reduced IT headaches by decreasing the number of systems the company is using for scheduling.

Also, by having real-time tools to manage dates and scheduling commitments, the company has seen significant improvements in data quality. Sites are now more aligned because of the consistency brought by using the same planning and scheduling tools, which allows them to manage backlog consistently and produce quality metrics. Maintenance is now able to clearly see how their work impacts other areas because of better business intelligence metrics.

Summary

The enhanced functionality provided by Prometheus solutions is helping users across industries and regions to be more efficient and focus on planning and scheduling best practices. This helps reduce reactive work, which can easily cost three to five times as much as planned work.

Beginning planners benefit because the tools are more intuitive and easier to use than standard SAP. This helps with both training and end user adoption. Advanced users also find value in the solutions because they can better utilize SAP to manage dates and backlogs.

This video shows how to update and maintain the shifts of each resource assigned to a work center using the shift updater capability found in the Graphical Work Order Scheduler (GWOS) tool for simple scheduling in SAP PM. The tool integrates with HR data to display resource hours and helps make educated scheduling decisions.