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Plant Maintenance with SAP

Hello again! This post will briefly describe how SAP supports Plant Maintenance. Let’s get started!

Foreword

Currently, we see and experience quite impressive changes, developments, trends around us. It is not only about Machine Learning, neither Internet of Things. The world is evolving in every aspect. Who would have thought, that we will use NFTs or Metaverse? The same happens to technologies supporting logistics systems. In this short post I am going to briefly describe what does SAP currently offer when it comes to new technology supporting Plant Maintenance area.

About Plant Maintenance

Before we jump strictly into SAP’s portfolio for Plant Maintenance, let’s make sure we all know what PM actually is, and what it is not. Of course, you can scroll this section down, if this does not apply to you! Let’s begin with some terminology:

Plant Maintenance involves inspecting, maintaining, repairing and replacing equipment, machinery and other assets that support the everyday operations of Plants.

The general aim of Plant Maintenance is to create a productive working environment that is also safe for workers. To meet this goal there are several types of maintenance. The very basic one is Reactive Maintenance. We wait for the machine/equipment to experience a functional failure, and then we react = repair, exchange, or utilize the technical object.

There are also other methods like Preventive maintenance, Condition-based maintenance, Predictive maintenance and Prescriptive maintenance. For now, I will just focus on the last one, as it is something new.

Prescriptive maintenance uses sensors, data and advanced analytics to determine the route cause of a potential failure, so specific corrective actions can be prescribed. If you want to learn more about Maintenance Management and maintenance types, I encourage you to visit the following websites:

Once we selected our Maintenance type, we can continue with the execution of our strategy. In SAP we mostly work with:

  • Work Orders
  • Notifications

But this is not a rocket science – these are basics of the classic SAP Plant Maintenance. In the last couple of years SAP developed new products, which can drastically change the way you handle maintenance work, decision, analysis and more. Traditional maintenance methods (done one a paper/excel file) like Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, RCM or Criticality Assessments are now part of new products from SAP.

SAP Products

To have a better understanding what are the current SAP Products (04/2022) supporting Plant Maintenance – please have a look at the below graphic. My research illustrates products available for a date of April 2022.

As you see, there are many SAP Products supporting Plant Maintenance. Moreover, many of them are Cloud-based solutions. The whole Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite brings a real change for PM activities.

I hope this article gave you a quick but solid overview, so you can feel more comfortable with this topic. In the next article, I will describe the IAM package, so stay tuned!