SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Benefits

The latest water cooler talk at HPC was about Enterprise Asset Management. By combining elements of Plant Maintenance, Project Systems, Materials Management, and Warehouse Management, SAP EAM enables utilities to realize much higher productivity from PM orders compared to Internal Orders. After setting up a Functional Area hierarchy and identifying the location of all assets, utilities can create orders more efficiently via notifications (what we'd call a "pre-order"). So if the inspection of a pump, for example, identifies necessary corrective maintenance work, the order for that work can be created automatically. Tight integration with the MM module, plus records of prior labor and parts history, also mean that repair kits with all relevant parts can also be identified easily.

For utilities that are considering transitioning from their legacy CMMS to SAP EAM, we would make two particular recommendations. First, ensure that your project team includes subject matter experts from Engineering, Construction, Generation, Transmission and Distribution Maintenance—that is, the people who know what it takes to fix things that break. Their knowledge and requirements will ensure the success of the initiative beyond the needs of IT and Finance. Second, conduct a thorough review of all equipment so that nothing is inadvertently left out of Plant Maintenance. For selected assets, seriously consider bringing in a year or two of work history from the external CMMS.

Replacing legacy CMMS with SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

A transmission utility company we work with has two separate legal entities, one for Operations and another for Administration. Operations uses ManagerPlus to manage the utility's assets and their maintenance. In order to integrate that data with Administration's SAP FI/CO solution running on ECC 6.0, we're migrating the ManagerPlus data to the SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) module. The end result will be a single, integrated system that enables Operations to manage its maintenance work through PM orders, which collect the hours and rates of the employees performing the maintenance work. The SAP EAM solution will enable maintenance planning, work scheduling and a complete functional location hierarchy for fully-integrated SAP EAM work management and logistics with SAP Financials. By leveraging SAP's deep integration, the utility plans to eliminate time-consuming re-allocations of invoiced O&M work from their separate operating company for streamlined and accurate costing for rate case support.