Plant Maintenance with SAP: Business User Guide

Karl Liebstückel

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781493214846
• eBook ISBN: 9781493214853
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Plant maintenance with SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM) is more than just a routine checkup. Use this must-have guide to structure your functional locations, capture shift notes and shift reports, and much more. Dive into the technical underpinning of SAP PM, from material and plant maintenance assemblies to linear asset management. Discover best practices and real-world tips make to your SAP PM job easier. a. Best Practices for Your Day-to-Day Duties
Harness the power of SAP EAM with real-world best practices and strategies. Discover critical SAP EAM functionality like shift notes, shift reports, and preventative maintenance. b. Specialized Functionality and Framework
Master SAP EAM business processes, from planned repairs and refurbishment, to subcontracting, and pool asset management. Map and implement these processes to your specialized requirements with detailed guides to optimize SAP PM daily workload. c. Under-the-Hood Insight
Explore technologies both old and new; see how SAP Work Manager, SAP Rounds Manager, SAP Business Client, and SAP HANA can impact your day-to-day with SAP PM.

1 About This Book

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
—Thomas A. Edison

Slowly but surely, a new plant maintenance concept in enterprises is establishing itself in the minds of decision makers. This concept moves away from the notion of plant maintenance as purely a cost driver and towards the realization that goal-oriented, modern plant maintenance can be a success factor and provide a competitive advantage in your company. In other words, the trend is moving away from terms like cost factor and towards descriptions and components that ensure machine availability, increase production, and ensure plant safety. At the same time, in many industries, more than 40% of enterprise costs are either directly or indirectly attributable to plant maintenance.[ 1 ] Even selling your company’s internal plant maintenance services to outside companies may be a possibility. Thus, the plant maintenance area can contribute to the increase in revenue.

Many enterprises are only now slowly realizing that, in plant maintenance, the transition from cost factor to success factor can be accomplished only with the support of modern communication and information technology. In most other enterprise areas, this idea has already been taken for granted. The chosen IT solution should, ideally, have the following features:

• Be embedded in the heterogeneous network of enterprise processes
• Flexibly support all plant maintenance-specific business processes—from the elimination of malfunctions via preventative plant maintenance up to new plant maintenance strategies such as Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) or Reliability-Based Maintenance (RCM)
• Be oriented towards future challenges in the enterprise and the market
• Integrate modern technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet, and mobile devices
• Be easy to use because, in contrast to other enterprise areas such as Purchasing or Accounting, your users in plant maintenance may not be familiar with the daily IT tools of the trade.

Moreover, decision makers have increasingly realized how important plant maintenance is for the implementation of Industry 4.0 concepts. Irrespective of the topic discussed in the context of Industry 4.0, the role of plant maintenance for these topics—and in particular the data-technical integration of plant maintenance—is always emphasized and underlined. This includes, for example:

• Machine-to-machine communication
• Autonomous production systems
• Human-to-machine communication
• Augmented reality
• Cyber-physical systems
• Smart factories
• Spare parts procurement via 3D printing
• Digital factories

One of SAP’s responses to these requirements is Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), which is part of SAP ERP 6.0. Illustrating the different uses for EAM, this book is based on this current release level. Now in its fourth edition, this updated and expanded book provides an overview of the current range of functions. As a result, each company must find its own solution in plant maintenance; thus, a pure description of the functions is insufficient here. Based on our twenty-five-plus years of experience of plant maintenance with SAP and our work on more than eighty customer projects, in this book, we will show you how you can use EAM functionality in your enterprise and also how not to use it.

The book uses customer examples to illustrate what other companies have done, and we also provide numerous practical tips that will be equally useful whether you are a beginner or an advanced user of a previous release of SAP ERP.

Unfortunately, widespread prejudice exists that usability is not necessarily a major feature of SAP applications. We have always been especially concerned not to let this prejudice become the final verdict. Usability is particularly significant in plant maintenance. Therefore, we devote an entire chapter to a range of measures that will help you to increase usability and thus user acceptance of the SAP system in your enterprise. Furthermore, we will present the results of a study we conducted at the university, which clearly proved that such measures yield an effective advantage in business processes to improve usability and demonstrated the extent to which they do so.

You can expect the following highlights: numerous tips and tricks for daily operations and advice on what you should (and should not) do in the course of your daily work.

1.1 Target Audience

This book is addressed to you directly. But, who are you? And what can you expect from this book?

• You are a project lead responsible for a project involving plant maintenance with SAP. In reality, you are also a technical expert, a maintenance planner, a workshop manager, an IT expert, and a member of the organizational team, among other things. This book gives you lots of advice on project management, IT strategy, and the other strands of your job.
• You are a member of the project team and are interested in creating a particular kind of system for plant maintenance with SAP. Therefore, your actual daily activities mean that you are also a maintenance planner, a workshop manager, an IT expert, a company engineer, a technical expert, a group leader, and a member of the organizational team, among other things. You too will find a lot of helpful advice in this book on business processes and procedures.
• You are a manager and have to decide whether or not to implement plant maintenance with SAP. In your daily work, you are a technical leader, a maintenance manager, a facility manager, an IT manager, and an organizational manager, among other roles. This book will give you specific information about what the SAP system can and cannot do.
• You are a key user, which means that you help your colleagues in their daily work of executing business processes, and you therefore need more background information on the system than the average user. This book will give you a lot of information about why something may or may not happen in the system, what you can do about it, and what you should not do.
• You are a consultant. This book will be useful to you whether you work in management consulting and need strategic advice, or are a specialist consultant and are looking for application information. You will obtain this information here.
• You are interested in plant maintenance with SAP on a general level. This book offers you an overview and a basic understanding of the subject matter as well as a certain level of detail.

Whom does this book not address? What will you not find here?

• If you are a developer who is looking for help with programming (for example, for interfaces or add-ons), this book not for you.
• If you are an end user and need a user guide for your enterprise’s SAP system, this book will only partly fulfill your requirements. Individual installed systems are often too multifaceted to include all possible variations in a single book.
• You are an (internal or external) consultant, key user, or member of the project team and are hoping for in-depth explanations and tips on Customizing from this book. You will not find such information here. For this topic, refer to the separate book, Configuring SAP Plant Maintenance, SAP PRESS, 2014, www.s...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Preface to the Fourth Edition
•   Preface to the First Edition
• 1   About This Book
• 2   Plant Maintenance and SAP: A Contradiction?
• 3   Organizational Structures
• 4   Structuring of Technical Systems
• 5   Business Processes
• 6   Integrating Applications from Other Departments
• 7   Plant Maintenance Controlling
• 8   New Information Technologies in Plant Maintenance
• 9   Usability
• A   List of Sources
• B   Overviews
• C   The Author
• D   Acknowledgments
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes