Hi,

Material Demands from PM Actions

Materials required can be connected to PM actions by creating a line with necessary part and quantity in the Work list/Materials tab of the PM Action windows. It is possible to configure the system to automatically create demands from the PM actions so that purchase orders can be created and in that way make sure the material will arrive in time to carry out the work for the work order.

Demands from Inventory Parts

An inventory part (serialized or non-serialized) can be added to a PM action. Inventory part demands created from the PM action's maintenance plan lines are available to be queried from the Inventory Part Availability Planning window. When publishing the material demands only the lines with the value of Generatable set to Yes are considered. In the Inventory Part Availability Planning window the demand lines are displayed in the All tab with the Type set to PM Action. Due dates are set to the planned dates of the maintenance plan lines.

The Inventory Part Demand Published check box in the Maintenance Plan tab in the PM Action windows indicates whether the maintenance plan lines are transferred to the Inventory Part Availability Planning window or not. If a PM action is to be replaced by another PM action, the material demand of the PM action to be replaced is not available for the Inventory Part Availability Planning and the checkbox is thus not checked for these lines.

The demand lines exist with the type PM Action until the work order is created. When a work order is generated from a maintenance plan line, the maintenance material requisition/material order of the work order is released and demands are transferred to the generated work order.

Demands are created for all maintenance plan lines set to be generatable. Demands are created from the first line in the maintenance plan up to the inventory part demand horizon. This is set in the Site/Maintenance tab for the object property PM Inventory Part Demand Horizon and is calculated from the system date.

Demands from Non-Inventory Parts

It is possible to automatically create purchase requisitions for non-inventory material on a PM action so that the material can arrive in time to carry out the work for a work order. The purchase requisitions are created automatically by the scheduled database task Create purchase demands for non-inventory parts on PM actions that needs to be configured to run daily. This task checks the necessity of creating purchase requisitions which needs to be created as demands for PM actions.

If the total of system date, total lead time of the non-inventory part, and the value of internal time for handling the purchase (entered in the System Definition window for the property name PM_NONINV_LEAD_TIME) equals a planned date in the maintenance plan of an active PM, then the scheduled database task creates purchase requisitions and purchase requisition lines to create the demands for the non-inventory parts.

If there are multiple parts added to the PM action the part with the longest lead time will be considered when the scheduled task is run. It creates a purchase requisition and purchase requisition lines with latest order dates calculated according to the lead times of the parts. If non-inventory parts from two or more different sites (of the same company) has been added as material, the scheduled task will create one purchase requisition per site.

Maintenance plan lines for which work orders are generated or lines with the value of Generatable set to No are not considered for purchase requisition generation when the scheduled task is run. If a PM action is to be replaced by another PM action, purchase requisitions are also not created.

Purchase requisitions are created with the Requisitioner set as PM.

Thanks & Best Regards,

Nipun

@Nipun Gunaratne - thank you for the response. Prior to creating the original post I read all of what you posed above in the IFS help documentation and it wasn’t clear. The first image below is an example of what I’m attempting to explain in words (keep in mind, I stated there were close to 300 different PM Actions for a single machine, most have materials required).

This machine has been shut down since April. As you can see, the PM Job is “planning” for monthly maintenance even though on 5/20 the remaining hours before the next service was 670 (the 513% Due appears to be calculated based on the date, not the condition). That hasn’t changed since April, yet every month it’s generating inventory part demand for a work order that hasn’t been created. An organization would never complete 5 work orders (in this specific example) for the same PM during a shutdown. Why is it planning for this even though the last recorded value has not yet reached the Planned Value? This creates significant confusion when someone looks at the requisitions and sees all this “fake” demand for the same part.

If you are saying that I need to go into each of the 300 PM’s and flip the Generatable flag to No just to keep this from happening each month the machine is down - I find that unacceptable and a significant waste of time when I’m managing 40 of these machines. In my opinion, it should only be creating part demand for the 5/20 Due Date. This way it’s obvious what needs to be released. Once the Last Recorded Value goes above the Planned Value, only one work order will be created anyway (see the 2nd image below when I manually changed the Last Recorded Value in our TEST environment). 

I’m trying to determine if I’m doing something wrong or if this is what I consider a “bug” in the materials planning of the PM Action.

@Nipun Gunaratne - thank you for the response. Prior to creating the original post I read all of what you posed above in the IFS help documentation and it wasn’t clear. The first image below is an example of what I’m attempting to explain in words (keep in mind, I stated there were close to 300 different PM Actions for a single machine, most have materials required).

This machine has been shut down since April. As you can see, the PM Job is “planning” for monthly maintenance even though on 5/20 the remaining hours before the next service was 670 (the 513% Due appears to be calculated based on the date, not the condition). That hasn’t changed since April, yet every month it’s generating inventory part demand for a work order that hasn’t been created. An organization would never complete 5 work orders (in this specific example) for the same PM during a shutdown. Why is it planning for this even though the last recorded value has not yet reached the Planned Value? This creates significant confusion when someone looks at the requisitions and sees all this “fake” demand for the same part.

If you are saying that I need to go into each of the 300 PM’s and flip the Generatable flag to No just to keep this from happening each month the machine is down - I find that unacceptable and a significant waste of time when I’m managing 40 of these machines. In my opinion, it should only be creating part demand for the 5/20 Due Date. This way it’s obvious what needs to be released. Once the Last Recorded Value goes above the Planned Value, only one work order will be created anyway (see the 2nd image below when I manually changed the Last Recorded Value in our TEST environment). 

I’m trying to determine if I’m doing something wrong or if this is what I consider a “bug” in the materials planning of the PM Action.

 

 

I Think this should need to be discussed with product development team member. I’m not aware about this situation but that’s a good concerned raised. 

Thanks & Best Regards,

Nipun

Hi,

I think the material demand from PM Action is decided and created from these rules.

From date for the material demand lines are created from the higher value of either:

• ‘Valid From’ date in PM Action/General tab.
• The System date.

To date for the material demand lines are created up to the least value of either:

• ‘Valid To’ date in PM Action/General tab.
• ‘PM_PLAN_HORIZON’ defined in Application Base Setup/System Setup/System Definitions/Object Property tab
• The date you get by adding the number of days in ‘PM Inventory Part Demand Horizon (Days)’ field in Site/Maintenance tab to the current System date.

According to this, the easiest for you will probably be to decrease the value in ‘PM Inventory Part Demand Horizon (Days)’ field to shorten down the days forward the material demands will be set.  

Otherwise the way to go is probably to either set the PM Action to Generatable = ‘No’ or the relevant Maintenance Plan lines to Generatable = ‘No’. If you are going to set the entire PM Actions to Generatable = ‘No’, you can do this for all in one go in the PM Administrator, if you can identify your PMs in a good way.

Hello @pekase ,

Thank you for the response. Unfortunately shortening the ‘PM Inventory Part Demand Horizon (Days)’ will not work in this instance because all the dates it’s planning for are in the past. That would work fine for future dates, but not when the machine has shut down and those predetermined ‘Due Dates’ are in the past.

Making all these non-generatable is not a good option either because it would be a constant battle to keep on top of them. I’m not in control of how long the machines are shut down, that is up to the organization that is contracting with us to do the work. They may tell us we are shut down for many months, only to come back a week later and tell us to start the machine up for more work. With so many machines, I don’t have the resources to ‘micro manage’ all the PM’s.

I believe that demand shouldn’t be automatically created this way. It would be perfectly acceptable to generate demand for one of the past lines, but it should stop there. No organization is going to perform all those duplicate work orders when the machine starts up, and IFS does ‘figure it out’ once the accumulated value hits the first Planned Value and that work order is created. At that point, all the other old dates go away and those material lines disappear. My issue with how all this is working now is that when the crews go to the machine to start it up, hundreds of duplicate parts are in the demand and there is great confusion on what needs to be released to purchase.

Thank you,

Brian

Hi,

I even think there is a possibility to enter a negative number into ‘PM Inventory Part Demand Horizon (Days)’ field to also remove material demands back in time. But I have not tested it myself to see what consequences it might have.  

Hello @pekase ,

Interesting - yes, it does allow for negative numbers and that does remove the old Published Demand. I appreciate the feedback since I wouldn’t have tried that based on the help for that line.

I agree that additional testing is needed to see what impact this has. I’ve tried it in our TEST environment this morning and it didn’t create demand when the work order was created. More work to be done before I say this has been resolved, so I’d appreciate any additional feedback anyone can provide!

Thank you.