What's a Crisis, and What's Normal?

If a manger is aware of it its automatically labeled a crisis. Even if it is of no real concern or problem to anyone or anything.

We use the SAP software system to generate our breakdown, normal,crib stock refurbishment, and preventative maintenance work orders. Breakdown, refurbishment, or normal work orders can be slotted in to Health and safety critical, Production Critical, Urgent 1-3 days, or schedule which offers from 1-3 weeks up to 4-6 weeks. It's really up to the person generating these work orders as well as the maintenance departments discretion as to were the work orders get placed.

Our preventative maintenance work orders can be time,event or count driven depending on how the maintenance plan is initially set up. It's really quite an in depth program offering many different ways of doing what is required to keep the plant running smoothly. And the part I like is the program never forgets when the next work to be done is due. This can be important for jobs that may only happen once a year or even once every 4 years.

Does it do everything? Absolutely not, but it is a very good foundation on which to build. The program must be thought of as a live program constantly in need of updating and management, if it's to be kept current.

With a good crew of people doing the work and an up to date program, many crisis can be avoided and the maintenance can be done when time permits instead of a breakdown situation.

How big is your company?

sap is not for everyone...

it can be quite expensive buying the modules & usually requires a integration specialist to implement

This facility ranges between 400 and 700 people depending on the market. Worldwide we are around 21,000 people strong. Yes it is an expensive program but it provides a means of tying together production, human resources, maintenance and materials in a way that most other programs can not.

MRP is good

I saw SAP bring a company to it's knees.

the problem was not the system, but the companie's lack of commitment, trying to hold on to some parts of their old system. I remember having to try to navigate between 2 computer based, a paper one & oral to order parts

not a deficiency of SAP, but an unwillingness to invest the resources necessary...

We had Mainsave before this SAP program. There is quite a learning curve. SAP is such a large program that it takes quite some time to implement. We are still not using all of it's potential. This is our second attempt at the maintenance portion of this program and it's working quite well. There needs to be a real comitment from the top down or this program would not be succesful.