Often, when moving to SAP, many organizations do not take advantages of the full Functional Location set-up. Remember, SAP is a powerful tool and we need to take advantage on the front end to reduce added work and frustration after implementation. The Functional Location is the designation for a specific location on a site and plant. Examples are pumps, vessel, area, structures, systems... The set up allows for five levels which allows for flexibility. The first two levels are standard but the rest are configurable based on your requirements. The structure from top to bottom should follow:
1 2 3 4 5
XXX-XXX-XX-XX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
Level 1: Three (3) Character field for Plant Site - Cluster or Standalone facility. Example: Atlanta (ATL).
Level 2: Three (3) Character field for Plant on the site. A Business Unit can have multiple Plants in one Plant Site. Example: BU 1 has Plant A, Plant B, and Plant C. Example, for multiple plants on a site use 001, 002, 003. For our plant we will use 001
Level 3: Two (2) Character field for Unit. Many plants can have multiple units. Use this field to identify the specific unit. For our purpose we will use monomer as our unit (MO)
Level 4: Two (2) Character field for Process Step or Department. Our example is distillation (DS)
Level 5: Twelve (12) Character field for Position, Instrument indicator or other miscellaneous data. Use of all twelve characters is not mandatory. Any additional information involved should be defined through the use of additional characters "-" within the defined field. For our purposes we will use pump P2334 (P2334).
So our Functional Location is now: ATL-001-MO-DS-P2334. For an instrument (TI183487) in the same plant, unit and process step, our Functional Location is now: ATL-001-MO-DS-TI183487.
The key is to capture the true cost of Maintenance activities that are performed is at the lowest level and have the rest of the cost roll up to the highest level. In our examples, all cost is associated with the lowest level on the Functional Location and rolls up through the process step, unit, plant and finally site.
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Tip Provided by:
Brian Wilson
People and Processes, Inc.
Principal Consultant
bwilson@peopleandprocesses.com
