WCM

Work Clearance Management

Why do we need Work clearance management?

Maintenance crews generally work in hazardous environment ( E.g. High voltage, radiation exposure). There are some work related illness which requires special health and safety measures. SAP WCM enables you t control and monitor these activities. This means you are able to ensure safe and secure working conditions for maintenance crew, observe environmental regulations and guarantee technical system availability. 

There are 2 WCM models that SAP supports: Standard Model and Enhanced Model. At Planning Plant level only 1 model can be activated.

1) In Enhanced model, PM Order is linked to WCM Objects as below:

PM Order --> WAP (Work Approval) --> WCA & WA --> WCD (Work Clearance documents- Linked to WCA)

2) In Standard model, PM Order is linked to WCM Objects as below

PM Order --> WCA --> WCD (Work Clearance documents- Linked to WCA)

Terminologies in WCM : 

1) Work approval is an Umbrella Object in WCM which can have under it WCA, other Work applications (WA) including Hot work Approvals, Chemical environment approvals, Hazardous Gas approvals etc. Work approval links PM Maintenance Orders to WCA and other applications in an Enhanced WCM scenario. In a standard scenario, it is the WCA which links PM Order to WCD’s.

2) Work Clearance application (WCA)  is a WCM Object which represents a Safety certificate in particular for Lockout/Tagout. It is used to control maintenance processing and groups together Operational WCD’s. A Work clearance Application can be assigned to several Operational WCD’s and vice versa.. In the Enhanced model (as configured), a WCA is used to control communication between work approvals and Operational WCD’s. The term WCD will be elaborated in next step

Work applications are additional specific work related certificates. For example Hot work application, Hazardous Chemical/Gas/Particulate work certificate etc. The Hot work application, for instance, is to protect  a maintenance personnel from a hot working environment before entering the actual maintenance site.

3) Operational WCD is a WCM Object that is actually meant for executing the Operational cycle. The default operational cycle is Tagging with Temporary Untagging phase. It would consist of 3 key phases namely Tagging phase, Temporary Untagging phase (To test when work has been done before making a system fully operational) and Untagging phase. It is in the WCD that we define Lockout/Tagout operations for Technical Objects which need to be isolated temporarily from Technical system.

Operational WCD should be assigned to WCA and its status will affect the status of WCA. Here the status of WCD will be transferred to the linked WCA. For example, once the Tagging operation is finished, the Tagged status will be assigned to WCD and transferred to WCA.

Process Flow : 

1) Creation of PM work order via notification or Maintenance plan

2) Plan order - Use control key WCM for work clearance management related operations.Go      to -> Permits and assign a relevant permit indicating that it is a WCM work

3) Define Valuation in PM Order – Valuation means which applications would be included         for WCM purpose while performing the Maintenance work

4) Create a Work Approval (WAP) and Link it to Maintenance Order.

5) 

Work is in progress...stay tuned for further updates