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How to prepare Master Data for SAP EAM Inspection Checklists

Welcome to another article, again purely related to SAP Asset Management und yeah – again around EAM Inspection Checklists. In this one I will explain step by step, how does the master data work in this process (inspection), how you can prepare it by yourself and how to understand it fast, without spending a week figuring out how, what, when and why.
SAP EAM Inspection Checklists master data preparation steps, guide, tutorial with step by step instructions

Introduction

This article is a follow-up to my previous one, where I described step by step, how to configure Inspection Checklists in SAP S/4HANA. If you follow me for some time, you also know this YT video, where I described the feature from Business Perspective, with a real case scenario. Okay, now it’s time to present the master data topic.

Business Case / Example

As you know, everything you find here or on YouTube is first of all easy to understand, plainly explained, with cool graphics but also with real world examples. That’s why we gonna start with the Business Case first.

We are running a Business – a chain of Vehicle Workshops. We repair vehicles and machines of our partners and individual Clients. To make sure, we can always deliver the same, high level of service – we have to keep our assets in working condition. If one of our car lifts stops working, it’s not the end of the world, it’s a minor problem. However, if our main welder got damaged – we have an issue. To get rid of such cases, or to reduce them to the very minimum – we need to be preventive, and regular inspections of our critical assets are one of the solutions.

For the welder we just want to inspect the condition of the nozzle. If it’s damaged, cracked, we mark it as not okay in SAP S/4HANA and we want to have an automatic EAM Notification created in the system. If it’s okay, everything is fine – we just record this information in SAP, but don’t trigger anything.

For the wheel balancer we want to inspect the position of the machine, if their coordinates changed after the virbration caused by daily work, daily usage. We want to enter the values, and if they deviate from the baseline, we want some automatic follow-on actions (like an EAM Notification for instance).

Now let’s do the real SAP work.

Master Data preparation

We will use the graphic which I designed for Checklists Master Data. You can always visit this section if you want to download the full version.

We start with Asset Management area. To do anything, we need our assets in the System, in other words – Technical objects/technical systems. As you already know we have many of them in SAP EAM. In this process you can only use Equipment and/or Functional Locations. Our Workshop is reflected in the system as a Functional Location and all the essential machines, assets which are there – they are also in the system as list of Equipment. What’s more, these assets are ‘installed’ in the location, so we have a hierarchy, an Object List, which we will need in the next steps.

The next step is to classify the technical objects, which are relevant for EAM Inspection Checklists. In our case – the welder and the wheel balancer. We go to transaction IE02/IL02 and enter the class, which we configured in the system for the checklists. It can be an empty class, without characteristics. What’s important here, its name has to match the class, which we will use in the next step in the Quality Management area (the name of the class has to be the same, but the type of class is different, here it is 002 – Equipment Class). If your scenario of generating Inspection Checklists is more complex, for example you need different checklists depending on object type or any other criteria, then this class won’t be empty anymore, as you have to define these dependencies/criteria here. Moreover, I created two classes – one for the welder, second one for the wheel balancer. You will find out in the next steps why.

The second step is to prepare a task list, which we will then use during planning and work orders generation. Task list is a list of things, activities which we plan to be executed by our Technicians. In my case I go to the transaction IA05 and create a general task list with 3 operations:

  1. Inspection
  2. Spare parts replacement
  3. Test run.

There is one crucial thing here. I have to assign the checklist type CL01MM to the inspection operation, the same which I have chosen in the classification.

The third step is to now on the other side of the fence – in other words, we jump to Quality Management (QM) area. Here we define an Inspection Plan first – a plan, which will hold all the inspection activities. Similar to maintenance task list we create an operation (this time only one), then we define inspection characteristics. Before we go any further with the next SAP steps, let’s have a look one more time at our business case.

We want to inspect just one specific welder and one wheel balancer. We want to do it once per month. Like I already mentioned, inspection means repeating the same activities regularly. So for the welder we want to inspect the nozzle condition every month, for the wheel balancer we inspect position (coordinates) of the baseline. With this knowledge we can continue preparation of the master data.

We create an Inspection Plan – we will need actually two separate plans for these assets. Why? Because we have different activities for these two objects. If we had 2 welders, we would just create one plan. We go to transaction QP01, enter the Plant and also Plan Group.  Of course, we will also need a material number – just reach out to your QM/MM colleagues, or create it by yourself via MM01 transaction. Then we go to Operations and create one, let’s say Inspection checklist. We select it and jump to inspection characteristics. Here we just add again the QM data, which defines what we want to inspect. For the welder it’s a qualitative data, OK or NOT OKAY – you select the relevant master inspection from the list (it has to be created beforehand).

We go back, as we didn’t do the most important thing yet. Above, in the Additional tab we jump to Classification – Header. Here we got to assign the classes, in my case CL_SAPDUDE_WD for the welder’s inspection plan. Without it, the whole EAM Inspection Checklists logic won’t work, and the checklists won’t be generated in PM Orders.

We repeat the step. This time we create an Inspection Plan for the wheel balancer. We use the same group, but with a next counter and we assign the same material number. Then we define an operation, assign inspection characteristics and assign the second class, which is CL_SAPDUDE_WB . This way the QM steps are done.

It’s time to create a PM Maintenance Plan, schedule it and see if the checklists are generated. If you just want to test it, there is another, better way of doing so. You can use transaction IW97, which is for Checklists Simulation purposes. You enter your PM Task List there, technical object and so on (depends on your scenario) and the SAP S/4HANA system will show you the results. If it’s empty, it means there are no checklists to be generated for this object or you entered the wrong data. Above you can see an example of such simulation.

I create the plan for Texas Workshops Main Hall. We will use the PM Task List defined in the previous steps. I enter the details of the plan and switch to scheduling.

The work order should be already in the system. I will use the old, GUI way – because Checklists tab is not currently available in the Fiori App for Work Orders. I got my order, I see the Object List is there, then I jump to the Checklists tab and voilla – checklists are there. I can now enter the results.

If you want to see how to enter the inspections results, check out my YT Video, where I show 2 ways – with SAP GUI (which is not User-Friendly) and with SAP Service and Asset Manager (native, mobile application from SAP). I hope you learned something new here, if so – spread the knowledge further, check out my YT channel, let other know via linkedin, where I am also active.

Cheers,
Dan

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