Configuring SAP ERP Plant Maintenance

Karl Liebstückel

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781592299324
• eBook ISBN: 9781592299331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Whether you're working on an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) implementation, upgrade, or optimization project, this comprehensive guide will provide you all the details necessary to bring your plant maintenance system to life. Learn how to configure EAM to support planning, execution, and settlement processes for plant maintenance measures. Project team leads and key users will benefit from step-by-step configurations and best practices, and will learn how to avoid common obstacles.

Highlights:

• Order handling
• Customizing
• Maintenance planning and processing
• Mapping: orders and functions
• Preventative maintenance
• External processing
• Linear Asset Management
• Pool Asset Management
• Subcontracting
• Deadline monitoring
• Cross-plant maintenance
• BAdIs

If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.​
—KUAN CHUNG TZU, Chinese philosopher, Book of Master Kuan

1 About This Book

The book entitled Plant Maintenance with SAP—Practical Guide* introduced the functional side of SAP’s plant maintenance solution, namely SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM), which is part of SAP ERP release 6.0. There, the focus was on the system’s options and limitations in terms of accomplishing day-to-day tasks. Because this practical guide addressed business topics in particular, it adopted an application-specific viewpoint.

* K. Liebstückel, Plant Maintenance with SAP—Practical Guide (3rd edition, SAP PRESS, 2014).

You are now reading Configuring SAP Plant Maintenance, which adopts a technical viewpoint and focuses on the how, for example:

• How do I set up my organizational structures?
• How should I configure the Customizing settings so the asset structures can be mapped to the users’ requirements?
• How should I configure Customizing so that my business processes can be handled in the manner discussed with the users?
• How should I configure the usability tools so that there is greater user acceptance of the system?

This book provides an overview of the configuration options currently available. Using more than 25 years of experience working in SAP plant maintenance on more than 70 customer projects, we’ll not only show you how you can adapt SAP EAM to the needs of your enterprise and your users, but we’ll also highlight some essential do’s and don’ts.

This book uses customer examples to illustrate what other companies have done. We also provide numerous practical tips that are equally useful whether you are a beginner or an advanced user of a previous release of the system.

1.1 Target Audience

This book always addresses you directly. So, who are you? And what can you expect from this book?

• If you are a project lead responsible for an SAP plant maintenance project, this book gives you a lot of advice about project management and the configuration and adjustment options available within the system.
• If you are a member of a project team that has been assigned to an SAP implementation project and are responsible for adjusting the system to the needs of the enterprise and users, this book gives you plenty of tips in relation to the configuration and adjustment options available within the system.
• If you are an external consultant and, as a specialist consultant, you are looking for some background information, explanations in relation to the configuration and adjustment options associated with the system, and recommendations for best practices, which you can then impart to your customers, this is the book for you.
• If you are an internal consultant (often known as a business consultant), and you are to take over all IT-related support for the user department from the IT or organizational department, this book also gives you many tips in relation to the configuration and adjustment options available within the system.
• If you are a key user, which means that you help your colleagues in their daily work and therefore need more background information on the system than your colleagues, this book provides a great deal of background information in relation to system behavior and how this behavior manifests itself. This book enables you to have more targeted and skilled discussions about the needs of your users with the relevant project team members, project lead, or consultants.
• If you are a developer who is looking for help with programming (e.g., for interfaces or add-ons), this book is, to some extent, for you. At various points throughout the book, we’ll give you information about technical implementations (e.g., customer exits, BAPIs, and BAdIs) without actually discussing the implementation or programming itself.

Who is this book unsuitable for? And what will you not find here?

• If you are an end user who is looking for user documentation in relation to the SAP system, this book is not for you.
• If you are a manager and have to decide whether or not to implement SAP EAM, this book is not for you because it contains only system-oriented information. In other words, it doesn’t provide any specific information about whether or not the SAP system is suitable for you.
• If you’re interested in SAP plant maintenance on a general level, this book is not for you. Instead of adding to your basic understanding of plant maintenance or providing an overview, the many details contained in this book will most likely cause confusion. Please consult the practical guide instead.

1.2 What This Book Can and Cannot Do

You can expect the following from this book:

• Show you how to implement the SAP system. In particular, you will learn what you need to be aware of during implementation (success factors) and what could endanger your implementation project (risk factors).
• Provide you with a basic understanding of the philosophy associated with configuring SAP systems, especially their options and limitations.
• Use Customizing settings to not only demonstrate how you can adjust the system to the needs of your enterprise, but also to highlight the limitations associated with some settings.
• Recommend which settings to configure and which to avoid.
• Introduce you to technologies that you can use to adjust the system interface to the needs of your users and to identify the system’s limitations.
• Give you many useful tips and tricks for your SAP EAM system.

However, this book doesn’t describe any applications or functions. It provides some programming information, but it doesn’t provide any source code and is not end-user documentation.*

* This is usually not the case with SAP documentation.

A lesson learned from experiences with past projects is that every enterprise has its own idea of how the system should be used. This means, for example, that every enterprise maps its technical assets differently, every enterprise sets up its business processes differently, and every enterprise needs to connect to different systems, and so on and so forth. Therefore, you should regard the information presented in this book as a resource for adapting the system to your enterprise’s individual needs and thereby creating your own SAP plant maintenance system.

1.3 Structure of This Book

This book is divided into nine chapters, as briefly outlined next.

Chapter 2, SAP Projects in Plant Maintenance, discusses the findings of an empirical study in which other enterprises were asked to state what they believe are the reasons behind the success factors and risk factors of their SAP projects. You’ll learn how you can approach an SAP plant maintenance project in a methodical way and what you should watch out for in this kind of project.

Organizational structures are the basis of everything in an SAP system. Chapter 3, Organizational Structures, explains the generic SAP organizational units. It also shows you which plant maintenance-specific organizational units and work centers are required for other procedures and how you should configure these.

The SAP system has Customizing functions that are used by several objects (e.g., field selection, status control, and lists). To avoid having to describe these for every single object, Chapter 4, Generic Functions, describes the various configuration and adjustment options and, in each case, references which object uses which function.

SAP provides various elements (e.g., equipment and functional locations) for mapping a custom asset structure. Chapter 5, Structuring of Technical Systems, describes the settings available to you within the SAP system so that you can adjust certain aspects of structuring your technical system to your requirements.

Chapter 6, Maintenance Processing, shows you all possible settings for a basic process, which you can use to adjust processing of maintenance tasks to your requirements. The...

Table of contents

• Notes on Usage and on the Screen Presentation
• Table of Contents
• Dear Reader
• Acknowledgments
• 1 About This Book
• 2 SAP Projects in Plant Maintenance
• 3 Organizational Structures
• 4 Generic Functions
• 5 Structuring of Technical Systems
• 6 Maintenance Processing
• 7 Preventive Maintenance
• 8 Additional Business Processes
• 9 Usability
• A Project Plans and Overviews
• B The Author
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes