Malfunction reports

The planning system must at all times be informed about malfunctions, downtimes, etc. Productivity indicators can only be calculated correctly when the according uptimes and downtimes are known. The SAP system uses so-called malfunction reports for this. Every alarm defined in zenon for a process variable can be configured as a malfunction report. Relevant messages are usually documented in SAP. "Relevant" means that the messages require maintenance services in order to be resolved.

Malfunction reports are created from zenon alarms. When there is an alarm for one of the variables linked to the element, a malfunction report will be created in the maintenance module of the SAP system. If there is a Cleared event for an alarm, the malfunction report will be acquired via the document number, and the time stamp of the Cleared event will be recorded.

For every type (SAP category) of malfunction report, you can define a separate group of malfunction reports in the control system. The most significant property of a malfunction report in the SAP system is the so-called "Notification type". It defines how the malfunction report will be processed in the workflow of the SAP system. There are predefined notification types in the SAP system. If you do not specify one of the predefined notification types when trying to create a malfunction report, the SAP will not create a malfunction report but return an error message.

Info

You may also choose to define a maintenance plant and a reporter for every notification type. If you do not specify a plant or a reporter, the SAP system will insert default values.

Every malfunction report refers to an installation part that is predefined in the SAP system. Such an installation part can be a so-called "functional location" or a so-called "equipment". Every functional location can in turn contain functional locations and/or equipments.

Every functional location and every equipment have a unique identification that must be specified when creating a malfunction report. The identification for functional locations or equipments is taken from the resources label of the linked variables. Via the property "Functional location/Equipment", you can configure whether the resources label shall be interpreted as the identification of a functional location or an equipment.

You can now link variables to the malfunction reports you just defined. If there is an alarm for one of the linked variables, a malfunction report will be created in the SAP system using the defined parameters and the value and the limit text of the variable.

The malfunction reports receive a unique document number in the SAP system, which will be stored as a comment in the alarm entry of the zenon variable. This allows you to map the alarm event to the document number of the malfunction report in the SAP system.

Attention

If an alarm has a dynamic limit text, the comment field of the entry is not available; instead, an entry to the Chronological Event List will be created, which allows to map the alarm to the document number.