In heavy asset intensive industries from manufacturing and processing facilities through to Rail, Aerospace, Utilities, Oil & Gas and Mining operations, the largest operational expense beyond the CAPEX of building the plant resides in maintaining the equipment required to do the job.

Being able to use your technology, your business processes and your people to help move your organisation from reactive to preventative and ultimately predictive is how you reduce costs associated with both failed equipment and lost production throughput. There are three fundamental areas to get right in achieving effective and efficient asset management:

• Asset Definition – The asset base is defined as Functional Locations and Equipment, and supported by Classification (for attributes), Bills of Material (for spare parts) and Catalog Profiles (for fault codes). Data update and governance processes integrated into the work management processes then keep the asset base up to date.
• Asset Management – Processing of repair, construction, preventive/inspection, emergency, and customer work from initiation through completion and close-out with asset history to achieve an optimum balance between maintenance costs and resource utilisation, and asset performance outcomes.
• Performance Analysis – Analysing the performance of the assets and the work management processes to identify opportunities for improvement.

SAP EAM delivers powerful capability to support these fundamentals through the Projects and Plant Maintenance modules and the Intelligent Asset Management suite, supported by and integrated with the whole suite of SAP capability across Supply Chain (inventory and purchasing), Finance, HCM, Sales and Analytics. In addition, Asset management is cradle to grave, so construction is part of it and extends through PPM, PS and PM. Utilities and rail for instance regard the three as intimately intertwined in the view of asset lifecycle and typically implement with all of them.   Subcategories: 1) Master Data Effective and accurate master data, maintained to a high-quality standard, is the foundation of Asset Management. This extends not just to asset master data representing the physical assets, but also to the other EAM master data such as Maintenance Plans and Task Lists. Master data that is not effective and accurate makes it impossible to reliably answer even the most basic, but critical questions about any type of performance metric or KPI, and it disrupts maintenance planning and delivery leading to unnecessary inefficiencies. The effectiveness of the master data is determined by its structuring (including level of detail), its classification, and its content, and is determined by the data design. The accuracy of the data is a measure of how well it represents the real-world physical assets or the tasks that the master data is modelling and is determined by manual or automated processes for data creation and update in response to changes. Given the above, SAP provides several powerful tools to manage the data quality, including master data governance tools (for active data quality checks on changes occurring) through graphical analytical tools (for data quality monitoring), to mass data rectification and update tools. Together these ensure alignment of the master data to the standards and level of consistency required to support the EAM processes and analytics. The SAP functionality in this area includes Functional Locations and Equipment to define the assets, and MDG (Master Data Governance), Information Steward and Data Services for managing data quality.   2) Linear Assets and Geospatial While for many organisations (e.g. processing plants) just simple asset hierarchies with point assets provide an adequate representation of their asset base, those with linear assets such as roads, rail, and pipelines, and those with geographically disperse assets such as distribution utilities require further means to both define and manage their assets. These additional features provide powerful capability for improved support of fault identification, work planning and scheduling and analytics. The functionality for linear assets, which can stretch for hundreds of kilometres, enables precise positioning of faults along the linear asset and is invaluable for seeing the relationship of work requirements and planning outages. Point assets (e.g. signs, valves) can also be positioned linearly along the linear asset to provide a complete view of the total asset network. Linear attributes allow changes in specifications along the linear asset to be identified and together with the linear positioning of defects and work enable the single linear asset to be managed down to a very detailed level, supporting asset optimisation, financial efficiency, risk mitigation and long-term capital planning. Geographically dispersed assets, including linear assets, also benefit from a geospatial view of their assets, positioning the assets on maps or on layers representing geospatial attributes like climate, climate risks (e.g. cyclones, bushfires), terrain conditions (e.g. salinity) and features (e.g. public buildings). This enables presentation of the assets and the work against them against maps which is a huge aid in work planning by supporting bundling of nearby work and, in combination with linear presentation of assets and their relationships / connectivity, in scoping outages. The SAP functionality in this area is LAM (Linear Asset Management) which provides linear enablement of Functional Locations, Equipment, Notifications, Work Orders, Measuring Points and Maintenance Plans) and GEF (Geographic Enablement Framework) which enables geospatial presentation of Functional Locations, Equipment, Notifications and Work Orders on maps.    3) Planning & Scheduling Planning and scheduling are the key processes to drive efficiency in maintenance work execution by ensuring that resources (labour, materials, services) are available when required, the priority work is undertaken first and correct work is bundled where outages or linear/spatial assets are involved. Planning is the process of working out what to do to deliver the work defined in a Work Order, and scheduling is the process of determining who will do it and when. Repeated studies have shown the benefits of planning and scheduling in optimising for workforce utilisation, business outcomes and lowest cost. Planning is performed within a Work Order and its Operations (the tasks within the Work Order) where labour, materials and services can be planned and integration to Supply Chain processes is triggered by Inventory Reservations and Purchase Requisitions. Task Lists and Maintenance Plans and are also key aids to work planning, with Task Lists holding all the planning needed for a task that occurs repeatedly over time and able to be imported into a Work Order, and Maintenance Plans providing an automated generation of planned Work Orders for a task that recurs regularly based on time or usage of the asset. Planning can also be assisted by a BOM (Bill of Materials, or spare parts list) held against the asset. For scheduling, while Work Orders can be individually scheduled, larger enterprises tend to use a more integrated approach with dedicated scheduling tools, either within SAP or using integrated third-party scheduling tools. These tools bring together views of the backlog of Work Orders and the availability and loading of the labour resources available to perform the work and are usually a graphical drag-and-drop UI to support fast processing.   4) Portfolio, Project and Construction Management Most assets begin their life under a Project, and that in turn often comes from a forward multi-year portfolio or program of work. The portfolio defines the major works to be undertaken in coming years and reflects the objectives of the organization with initiatives for expansion, refurbishment, EH&S. It provides a view of cost and effort and enables balancing of these across the whole work program. The project manages the planning and execution of an item in the work program, supporting it through the project lifecycle stages as it is designed and approved and then managing its detailed planning and execution with labour, materials and services interaction and consumption across a network of activities. Organisations that use internal labour to perform some or all construction work will often perform the execution of work via Work Orders linked to the Project. Projects have powerful costing capabilities and link into the Finance-driven asset capitalization processes. SAP functionality in this area is PPM (Portfolio and Project Management) or a third-party product, and Project Systems for the project planning and execution. Third-party tools are often also used for complex project scheduling activities.   5) Mobile Asset Management & UX All of the above is to no avail if we cannot the users to engage with and use the EAM software and that is where mobility and UX (User Experience) come in. EAM has typically the largest user base of any enterprise application, and those users are typically neither office bound nor see a computer as a core tool for their work activities. Our need for them to engage with our EAM systems to initiate, plan, schedule, perform and record outcomes for their work makes it essential that our systems are available where they work (and that means mobile and in the workplace) and present an intuitive user interface and experience (UX). Mobile solutions continue to evolve from their humble beginnings as work dispatch systems to their current evolution in the more powerful role as a key front-end to the asset management systems. They not only handle work lists but also job instructions, spare parts issue and return, job status updates, job history gathering, recording of measurements, gathering of images/photos, labour hours entry, updates to asset data and more. There are many vendors offering mobility systems as well as SAP’s own, further increasing the diversity of capability and usability now available to field workers wherever they may be working, whether connected to a mobile network or in a remote location without coverage. For all users, whether desktop or mobile, a consistent and efficient user interface to access the EAM system is key, and the use of tiles rather than menus to access functionality, and simple layout of information inside transactions in logical sequence all assist usability and thus achieve better user engagement. SAP’s Fiori applications provide this user experience to both desktop and mobile users. SAP functionality for mobility is Asset Manager or an integrated third party mobility solution, an for desktop is Fiori.   6) Rotables and Repairables Some assets are not disposed of when they fail but rather are refurbished and made available for reuse. Further, for some more critical and higher value assets there is a requirement for a lifecycle history to be available for the complete asset life through all previous usages and refurbishments when evaluating asset performance. Such assets are known as rotables, while assets that are simply refurbished and returned to inventory for reuse with no prior history are known as repairables. They each have quite different lifecycles and issues. Rotables management requires robust business processes as well as EAM functionality to ensure that all movements of, and activities performed on, are correctly allocated against the correct asset. For this reason a cost-benefit of rotables tracking should be evaluated before classifying a type of asset as a rotable rather than a much more simply managed repairable. There can also be issues for very high valued rotable assets of interaction with fixed Asset register and depreciation processes. However, despite the effort, there are strong arguments for full rotable tracking with all its issues to be employed on critical components to provide that full life cycle view and to enable detection of underlying faults that appear only over the longer term. For both rotables and repairables there is a high interaction with Supply Chain processes and the possibility of split valuation in inventory, with new items valuated differently to damaged or refurbished items. There are also issues of where to charge refurbishments (i.e. who pays for the refurbishment) and when to refurbish – immediately on receipt of each damaged item, or wait until a batch can be sent out for refurbishment with possible cost savings for quantity. And also which group should manage the refurbishment processes, which can have a high dependence on the Supply Chain processes around inventory and purchasing. SAP functionality includes material serialisation and linkage to the Equipment register and refurbishment Work Orders 7) Integration with Supply Chain, Procurement, Finance and other SAP Functionality The SAP EAM functionality across projects, maintenance and asset management is tightly integrated into the whole suite of SAP functionality, and in particular to Finance, Supply Chain, HCM (Human Capital Management), and Sales and Distribution (where billable work is being performed). The relationships while technically smooth can be conflicted in the real world of differing objectives for different groups (reduction of inventory or budgets versus safeguard spares levels and the need for comprehensive maintenance programs to ensure asset performance) – but in this regard the SAP issues simply reflect the real-world management issues that the organization lives with. Examples of the tight integration abound, and include generation of inventory reservations and purchase requisitions directly out of materials and services planning in Work Orders, direct Finance postings for all labour, material and services postings to a work order or project, personnel rosters and leave available to scheduling, billing initiated on completion of work. 8) Reporting & Analytics Reporting and analytics are often neglected when designing EAM systems, but in fact are as a key a component as any other.  The EAM system must be designed to provide the data to support reporting and analytics, and reporting and analytics can then deliver the measures needed to drive improvements in work and asset management processes. Without strong reporting and analytics the engineers, planners and field crews are flying blind – they are doing their best but they do not have the measures to understand their successes or identify opportunities for improvements. Reporting and analytics in the modern world are a mix of defined reports and dashboards used typically for management reporting and KPIs to monitor the business performance against define parameters of costs (e.g. performance against budget), work performance (e.g. resource utilisation) or asset performance (e.g. downtime), and flexible self service analytics bringing together a wide range of information in a flexible and intuitive environment to address questions as they arise. Nd frequently now the sources of information are not just SAP, with inputs often required from other systems such as customer, GIS, data historians or process control systems for instance. SAP functionality for reporting and analytics includes SAP Analytics Cloud and Business Warehouse in addition to the many standard reports available embedded in the SAP system. 9) Asset Management The drive for improved asset performance is moving the EAM from maintenance (response to defects) toward asset management (understand your asset and avoid the defects). The outcome is lower costs and higher asset performance, and ironically lower costs due to the inherent move to more planned work and less inefficient unplanned or emergency work. A win all around. The techniques for supporting asset management range across asset analytics to understand the asset performance and failures, asset data quality to enable extrapolation of individual asset performance to a whole suite of assets, and the methodologies of FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis), RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance) and predictive analytics. Together these deliver a strong view of the capabilities and weaknesses of a type of asset and help define activities and methods that will head off those weaknesses becoming failures – whether by preventive maintenance activities, by routine replacement as end-of-life approaches, or by upgrade to a new asset more suited to the function required. These techniques can be applied equally to a one-off instance of an asset or to a whole family of similar assets. While it may seem strange to place the holy grail of asset management last, successful asset management has a high dependency on getting the basics, as described in the previous sections, right. If you can’t define and classify your assets, if you can’t process a Work Order through its life cycle and gather its failure and performance information, then you will struggle to achieve the full benefits of the higher-level functions provided by the asset management tools. SAP functionality for asset management is focused on the IAM (Intelligent Asset Management) suite and includes AIN (Asset Intelligence Network) to integrate asset attribute and performance information across organisations, ASPM (Asset Strategy and Performance Management), PDMS (Predictive Maintenance and Service) and PEI (Predictive Engineering Insights). IAM brings together elements of Digital twin, Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Data Analytics.