Issues in maintenance? Great! Let's seize the opportunity!

In the past, asset management focused on cost reduction and efficiency improvement. However, in modern times like these – when availability and procurement often seem like an almost insurmountable task – this is too short-sighted. Supply chain issues, a shortage of skilled workers, and the climate crisis have long been foreseeable, but have become an acute problem for nearly all areas of European companies due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Europe. This has a drastic impact on asset management.

The simple core question: How is my asset doing?

Those who own preventive strategies are already in a good position. However, they only provide limited protection against unforeseen failures. What remains is the risk of production downtimes lasting several days and weeks – leading to existential problems for many companies when, for example, important spare parts cannot be delivered. Moreover, specialists necessary for repairs are rarely available in the market when they are most needed, or are booked out for months.

All these challenges are not new, but they are more important than ever. They have resulted in the recording and assessment of the technical condition of machines, equipment, and tools becoming the central focus of asset management and maintenance.

This is where technology comes into play. Industry 4.0 increasingly enables the effective and efficient automated recording of asset conditions, targeted evaluation, and prediction of future potential failures. We are talking about Predictive Maintenance. This allows for optimal advance planning and helps mitigate the impacts of supply chain issues and skilled labour shortages. And it is becoming increasingly cost-effective and simpler thanks to new standards and lower costs for sensors and transmission.

With SRB and SAP to more intelligence in asset management However, the implementation of intelligent maintenance is not as straightforward as it seems. Those who have an intelligent partner by their side can consider themselves fortunate. One like us, SRB. We bring our years of expertise into the partnership – experience that we and our maintenance experts have gathered in numerous successful projects with clients. With content ranging from in-depth analyses and planning to solid implementations and support in operations, as well as the development of extensions.

We rely on a central element: SAP Intelligent Asset Management, or IAM for short. This encompasses various solutions in the field of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) to optimise the condition and performance of assets. The foundation is laid by the Business Technology Platform (BTP), which provides the underlying capabilities along with integration services to the S/4 Digital Core. Capabilities such as IoT, Machine Learning, or Mobile Services.

IoT allows for the maintenance and servicing of physical assets based on real-time data, while Machine Learning (ML) recognises patterns in IoT data from historical incidents and can thereby predict machine failures with a certain probability in the medium term.

In the area of 'Mobility', the efficiency aspect is particularly emphasised. Here, standard SAP Fiori apps in the S/4 Digital Core, as well as the applications SAP Field Service Management (FSM) and SAP Service and Asset Manager, enable the mobile execution and billing of maintenance work – right where the work occurs, namely directly on-site at the asset.

For comprehensive evaluations, SAP offers the Analytics Cloud (SAC). There, flexible analysis functions based on your company-specific KPIs are available for use and retrieval.

To give you an initial overview of the entire range of possibilities and solutions from SAP in EAM and IAM,you will find a clear table here.

Approaching maintenance correctly – we show how Don't worry! We at SRB will not leave you alone in the 'dilemma of choice'. We just wanted to provide you with this initial overview to show how diverse the possibilities of modern maintenance are today. And we want to introduce you to the full range in even more detail. Therefore, this overview article marks the beginning of a smallblog serieson intelligent maintenance. In upcoming posts, we will delve deeper into topics such asmobile maintenancehttps://www.srb.at/blog--events/instandhaltung/index.aspx?detail=113&hl=Mobile%20Instandhaltung%20ist%20effiziente%20Instandhaltung, maintenance planning or predictive maintenance. We will show what is possible, how you can leverage today's issues to your advantage, and how you can benefit from modern solutions. Stay tuned, click in, learn!