Empowering Proactive Maintenance Strategies with SAP S/4HANA

The day in the life of a Maintenance strategist often revolves around achieving KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that would continuously enhance overall equipment effectiveness to maximize business efficiency. Maintenance strategists often formulate an effective maintenance strategy with facts and evidence that would ensure optimal results in terms of repair cost, maintenance cost & equipment performance. In today’s fast-paced business landscape, where downtime can lead to significant losses, proactive maintenance has become a critical strategy for organizations across industries. Leveraging advanced technologies to predict and prevent equipment failures before they occur can save time, money, and resources. One such technology that has revolutionized proactive maintenance is SAP S/4HANA.

In this blog, we will discuss how SAP S/4HANA cloud helps to accurately formulate the most economic predictive maintenance strategy based on selective SAP Fiori app features demonstrated through video content for enterprises to achieve maintenance excellence with a step-by-step approach.

Prioritizing Critical Assets for Proactive Maintenance

In the pursuit of an economically efficient maintenance approach, implementing proactive maintenance across all systems and components within a plant proves impractical. Hence, the need arises to accurately pinpoint critical systems, potential points of failure, and the associated maintenance costs. This task requires a blend of historical data, engineering insights, and operational expertise.

This is precisely where the significance of SAP Embedded Analytical Apps comes into play, as they assume a pivotal role in identifying the most suitable systems for proactive maintenance initiatives. To delve deeper, let’s sequentially explore how these SAP Embedded Analytical Apps effectively empower Maintenance Strategists to craft a strategy that’s not only optimized but also adaptive to changing operational dynamics.

Leveraging Historical Asset Performance for Enhanced Maintenance Strategies

The analysis of historical asset performance data stands as a cornerstone in the formulation of impactful maintenance strategies. This invaluable data resource empowers maintenance teams to unearth intricate patterns, establish performance benchmarks, and execute well-informed decisions that underpin operational excellence.

Within the realm of SAP’s comprehensive ecosystem, the Fiori app “Technical Object Breakdown” emerges as a pivotal tool. This app serves as a singular repository of information traversing the entire enterprise landscape. Its potency lies in its capability to facilitate historical breakdown analysis across diverse strata. This ranges from a panoramic view encompassing the entire plant down to a microscopic focus on specific objects. Moreover, it extends to the analysis of components, subsystems, and individual equipment units.

Reduced Unplanned Downtime in the Plant (Watch the Reference Video)

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/

Failure root cause analysis is an indispensable element of any comprehensive maintenance strategy. By delving into the underlying issues that lead to failures, organizations can make informed decisions to enhance their operational efficiency and equipment reliability.

In the realm of SAP technology, the Fiori framework offers a specialized tool—the SAP Fiori Technical Object Damage app—that empowers maintenance planners and technicians to engage in a systematic analysis of damage incidents linked to components, systems, and equipment specific to Plants. This app serves as a dynamic solution for identifying recurrent damages and pinpointing the systems and components responsible for these issues.

One of the key advantages of the SAP Fiori Technical Object Damage app is its configurability. Users can customize the app to accommodate their specific requirements. By applying diverse filtering criteria, such as Maintenance Plant, Object Type, Construction Type, and Catalog Profile, users can fine-tune their damage search to match particular conditions. The app’s versatility goes even further, enabling users to drill down into various dimensions of data. This includes exploring maintenance notifications and generating aggregated reports on repair activities. These features provide a comprehensive overview of the reliability of technical objects, shedding light on how effectively they perform over time.

In the context of broader SAP offerings, integrating the SAP Fiori Technical Object Damage app into SAP S/4HANA landscape can further enhance its capabilities. As part of the larger RISE with SAP initiative, businesses can leverage the app’s insights to align their operations with strategic goals and drive digital transformation.

Track and Analyze Damage Incidents (Watch the Reference Video)

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/

Conducting Analysis of Maintenance Expenditures

The financial aspect of maintenance holds significant importance within an enterprise. Envision the convenience a Maintenance strategist could experience in pinpointing areas of high maintenance expenditures across the entire plant. Within the realm of SAP S/4HANA, the Actual Maintenance Cost Analysis app presents a solution. This app furnishes real-time insights into costs and material consumption associated with maintenance operations, equipping users with the means to make well-timed decisions.

Through this app, users gain the capability to delve into tangible costs linked to both materials and labor within maintenance activities. Furthermore, it facilitates a comparison between overall costs incurred for corrective and preventive maintenance over a specific timeframe. By employing this tool, users can also isolate the maintenance tasks that contribute the most to expenditures or identify components of assets that incurred substantial costs during inspections.

Evaluate the Risks and Importance of Assets

Risk and criticality assessment involves the systematic examination of assets to determine the likelihood and potential consequences of their failure, using predefined evaluation templates.

Utilizing SAP APM (Asset Performance Management), this process becomes streamlined, enabling the early identification of risks and interdependencies. By leveraging SAP APM, proactive measures can be taken to mitigate issues before they lead to costly disruptions. This software facilitates the creation of dynamic risk models that encompass the broader organizational context, encompassing factors related to environmental concerns, safety considerations, and production impacts.

SAP APM establishes a standardized risk matrix aligned with the organization’s risk strategy, ensuring consistent and effective risk calculation and communication. To evaluate the risk and criticality of a technical asset, one would address predetermined template questions, subsequently quantifying the risk score and criticality value for each potential impact. Through this approach, SAP APM assists in pinpointing the assets of greatest significance and highest risk to the achievement of business objectives.

Closed-loop Asset Strategy and Execution

Achieving an optimal maintenance program necessitates a seamless connection between Asset Strategy and Maintenance execution, creating a closed-loop integration. SAP’s goal is to achieve this by establishing a bi-directional and more tightly integrated link between the Asset Performance Management solution and the Enterprise Asset Management solution.

SAP Asset Performance Management effectively enhances the functionalities of SAP Enterprise Asset Management solutions. This enhancement encompasses specialized features for strategy management, methodologies, IoT connectivity, and machine learning. These capabilities enable tasks like assessing machine health and predicting the remaining useful life of specific equipment.

The combined strengths of SAP S/4HANA Asset Management and SAP Asset Performance Management surpass the benefits of the individual solutions in isolation. Going forward, comprehensive integration across all stages of the closed-loop process will be facilitated.

Developing and Implementing Operational Strategies

Effective management of maintenance plays a pivotal role in ensuring the uninterrupted functionality of assets and machinery within organizations. The SAP Fiori App, “Manage Maintenance Plans,” presents a holistic approach to enhance the efficiency of maintenance planning procedures. This app streamlines the intricate process of maintenance planning, offering a user-centric interface. Featuring intuitive navigation and user-friendly tools, it enables users to effortlessly generate, modify, and oversee maintenance plans. Through this application, users can establish maintenance schedules triggered by either time or usage, guaranteeing the timely execution of maintenance activities.

Streamlining Maintenance Process (Watch the Reference Video)

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/

In Conclusion

SAP’s forward-looking maintenance solutions equip enterprises with the necessary resources and insights to prevent equipment breakdowns, optimize asset performance, and curtail maintenance expenditures. Through the utilization of SAP Fiori applications such as Technical Object Breakdown, Technical Object Damages, Actual Maintenance Cost Analysis, and Manage Maintenance Plan, companies can shift from a reactionary maintenance approach to a proactive one. This transformation leads to heightened efficiency, prolonged asset lifespan, and a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace.

SAP provides comprehensive end-to-end solutions, offering seamless Fiori coverage across systems, spanning from SAP S/4HANA integrated with SAP Asset Performance Management to actualize the vision of a closed-loop strategy and execution.