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.

SAP Enterprise Asset Management, Plant Maintenance and Design Engineering Hierarchies

HPC America has more client work to share. We're back at one of the largest utilities in the U.S., enhancing a control panel that we had originally developed a few years ago. The control panel comprises most of the functionality the utility needs to accomplish its day-to-day work, as well as manage outage or break down work using SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM).

We're now updating the "design engineering hierarchy" of the control panel. It enables users to select the type of work that needs to be performed, including any technical drawings to be attached, and with just a few clicks the program creates all of the required documents and manages their hierarchy. By using our custom design engineering hierarchy, the Plant Maintenance (PM) module's functional location and equipment master is updated timely and accurately without manual maintenance in SAP.