Notifications: codes, priority and dates

Corrective maintenance starts when someone notices a problem. At 07:40 on a Monday, the operator on Contoso's rotor line 1 sees winding machine 10000451 trip its spindle motor breaker for the third time in an hour. She creates a maintenance notification. SAP's training describes the notification as the starting point of corrective maintenance: it records a malfunction, damage or request, usually against a technical object, and can lead to a maintenance order, though not always.

Types and structure

The notification type decides the screens, number range, catalogs and priorities. Standard sample settings include M1 maintenance request, M2 malfunction report and M3 activity report; Contoso uses M2 for breakdowns and M1 for improvement requests. A notification has a header (object, description, priority, dates), items (object part, damage and cause), activities (work performed, important as proof for inspections) and tasks (work still to be done, by whom and by when).

Catalog codes

Coded fields come from catalogs. A catalog (for example, damage) contains code groups (mechanical, electrical), and each code group contains codes (bearing overheated, winding short). A catalog profile, assigned to the technical object or the notification type, limits the choices to code groups that make sense for that object. SAP lists the benefits plainly: fewer wrong entries, and codes can trigger workflows and follow-up actions. For Contoso, the payoff is analytics: if every winding machine breakdown carries object part, damage and cause codes, the reliability engineer can see that spindle motor bearings fail far more often than anything else.

Priority and required dates

The priority says how urgent the work is. Priorities belong to a priority type, which is assigned to the notification type in Customizing, and each priority can carry a relative start and end. When the user enters the priority, SAP calculates the required start and required end from it. SAP's own example: priority 1 might mean work starts two hours after the notification is created and finishes within two days. If the unit is days, the factory calendar is respected; units such as hours ignore non-working time.

The operator also sets the breakdown indicator and enters the malfunction start (07:40). Those fields feed breakdown statistics later, so a notification without them understates downtime. The new notification starts as outstanding; when Rosa puts it in process and creates an order from it, the status changes to show that an order is assigned.

Good notifications are short, specific and coded. Contoso's guideline for operators: name the object (scan or pick the equipment, not just the line), say what you saw in one sentence, set the breakdown flag only if production actually stopped, and pick the closest damage code even if you are unsure; the technician corrects codes during the technical confirmation. Planners screen new notifications twice a shift in the IW28 work list or the Maintenance Planning Overview, merge duplicates, and decide whether each one needs an order, can be handled as minor work, or should be rejected.

Notification or maintenance request?

SAP S/4HANA adds a second way in. With the phase model for maintenance (the reactive, proactive and improvement maintenance scope items), work starts as a maintenance request, which a supervisor screens before any planning is done. The order then moves through phases such as initiation, screening, planning, preparation, scheduling, execution, post-execution and completion, with subphases and approval steps that the classic flow does not have. Underneath it is still a notification and an order with the same tables (QMEL/QMIH for notifications, AUFK/AFIH for orders), so the costs and history work the same way. Contoso converted with the classic flow and lists the phase model as a post-go-live option; check which phases are active in your release before you design tests around them. In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the Fiori apps and the phase model are the main way to work, and SAP GUI transactions such as IW21 are not available.