Sap R/3 Plant Maintenance: Making It Work for Your Business - Hardcover

Stengl, Britta; Ematinger, Reinhard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201675323 ISBN 13: 9780201675320

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2001

Synopsis

SAP R/3 Plant Maintenance offers a clear introduction to this small but sophisticated component and provides a highly practical guide to implementing PM. Beginning with a examination of the key business processes underlying PM functionality, the book goes on to cover all the crucial aspects of maintenance planning and execution in R/3. Particular attention is given to integrating plant maintenance with a company's natural process flow.

About this title

About the Author

Britta Stengl is a certified Plant Maintenance (PM) and Customer Service (CS) consultant of many years' experience. She works for SAP AG at its headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.

Reinhard Ematinger is a certified Plant Maintenance (PM) and Customer Service (CS) consultant of many years' experience. He works for SAP AG at its headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.

0201675323AB07032001

From the Back Cover

Efficient plant maintenance is vital to a company's ability to optimize and harmonize its production processes. For companies using SAP's R/3 system, the effective implementation and use of the Plant Maintenance (PM) component represents a strategy with considerable practical benefits.

SAP R/3 Plant Maintenance

offers a clear introduction to this small but sophisticated component and provides a highly practical guide to implementing PM. Beginning with a examination of the key business processes underlying PM functionality, the book goes on to cover all the crucial aspects of maintenance planning and execution in R/3. Particular attention is given to integrating plant maintenance with a company's natural process flow.

Written for SAP project teams, consultants and students, SAP R/3 Plant Maintenanceprovides detailed coverage of the following essential topics:

• Defining plant maintenance from a business perspective

• Objects in R/3 PM

• Breakdown maintenance and corrective maintenance

• Planned maintenance

• Refurbishment processing

• External services management

• Integration with other R/3 components

• Interfaces with non-SAP systems

• Role-based and integration workshops
   

 

SAP R/3 Plant Maintenance is part of the Business Roadmap series from SAP Press. Aimed at users, managers and consultants, this series emphasizes the business background and the processes which underpin the functionality of the R/3 system and its various modules. Building on this deeper understanding, the books offer sound practical guidance on how best to tailor the system to the requirements of your business.

SERIES FEATURES:

• Experienced SAP-approved authors.

• Supported by real-life case studies.

• Illustrated examples from SAP s IDES training system.

• Written for all levels of R/3 user.

• Practical hints and customizing tips.

• Suitable for latest versions of R/3.

Britta Stengl and Reinhard Ematinger are both certified Plant Maintenance (PM) and Customer Service (CS) consultants of many years' experience. They work for SAP AG at its headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface I

Given the current international discussion of changing markets, the accompanying trend towards globalization of business processes and the increasingly evident revolution in intercompany communication via the internet, it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that optimized and harmonized production processes are the basic prerequisites for raising corporate IQ. It is precisely these aspects that form the starting point for the Plant Maintenance (PM) component in the SAP R/3 System.

This book has been written as a compendium for members of specialist teams. It provides interdisciplinary groups with a clear implementation guide, and aims at developing a new understanding of the software-assisted procedures in preventive and breakdown maintenance within a location. The book also presents a detailed discussion of technical implementation, thus enabling not only IT departments but also users to implement the process flows they actually require in the system. This knowledge will ultimately allow user departments to respond quickly and independently to changing demands, and adjust their workflows accordingly.

Using explanatory examples, the authors describe the practical day-to-day process flows clearly and unambiguously. The book is designed to cover all the topics relevant to maintenance planning and execution, as well as business processing of tasks, procurement, refurbishment of spare parts, and external services. Particular attention is given to integrating plant maintenance in the natural process flow of a company. To this end, integration of the PM component in the environment of Materials Management, Purchasing, Production, and Payroll is described in detail. Once the Plant Maintenance component has been successfully implemented, users can consider linking non-SAP systems at management level, as well as an Internet connection for quotation processing. When the internal process flows have been synchronized, companies have virtually unlimited options for optimizing their internal information flows.

Walldorf, January 2000
Ringo Kairies
Consulting Director
Process Industry
SAP AG

Preface II

The R/3 Plant Maintenance (PM) component from SAP is targeted at an area that may appear somewhat unspectacular when compared with business management in the areas of sales and production. As I will show, however, the PM component does more than merely add another cost planning area to those already covered by the R/3 System; it also provides specific new functionalities that enable SAP users to handle an area crucial for their strategic success.

In Western European economies, expenditure on maintaining production systems, public infrastructures and privately operated systems accounts for over 10 per cent of gross national product (Warnecke 1992). Although there are cases where it cannot be strictly delimited from investment costs (largely because there is a certain technical scope for substitution), plant maintenance planning accounts for an overwhelming volume of expenditure and must, therefore, be carried out efficiently. Economic planning of this type is of crucial importance, since the current trend is towards increased expenditure on plant maintenance. This is chiefly due to the growing complexity of production systems, which, in turn, is a result of progressive functional integration and automation. These production systems, which support the increasing productivity crucial for market competition, require ever more investible funds. While systems of this type continue to represent a structural increase in plant maintenance expenditure, this expenditure is, in some cases, being replaced by investment expenditure (partly as a result of the diminishing product and system life cycles as part of the optimization of life cycle/usage costs via asset management) (Biedermann 1990).

For these reasons, plant maintenance will remain an exceptionally important area for applying business methodology -- above all, in the areas of process control and cost management. A significant number of companies are now able to leverage their specialized production know-how as a strategic competitive factor. In such companies, there is also the potentially profitable chance that plant maintenance will be innovatively extended, becoming a key factor for competitive expertise in managing production effectiveness.

Optimizing the overall effectiveness of systems and assets is a key goal for cost management in plant maintenance. One way of achieving this goal is to systematically deploy modern organizational methods and plant maintenance strategies -- such as condition-based maintenance (CBM), continuous improvement programs (CIP), and specialist teams to ensure that plant maintenance is carried out as efficiently as possible.

In addition to this, cross-sector benchmarking can be applied to provide further starting points for increasing plant maintenance efficiency in accordance with the principles of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) with innovative advances toward designing best practice processes.

Given the advent of BPR and outsourcing, the pragmatic question that must be addressed is whether companies can ensure the diversity and depth of specialist knowledge required to continue autonomously developing practical expertise in production technology (to the extent that this represents a core competency). Finally, the increasing orientation of companies to monetary markets and customer demands has given rise to an area of business activity for plant maintenance specialists, the importance of which is not to be underestimated. Here, maintenance management plays an active part in the process of target costing, especially in the 'design to cost' development phase.

The predefined structures of the PM component provide comprehensive support for mapping the characteristic features of corporate plant maintenance in data processing systems. The component is also extensively integrated in a networked planning and financial environment, which covers all the activities of an enterprise. This ensures that all the information required for controlling plant maintenance is available holistically across all production activities involving systems. In addition to this, the powerful tried-and-tested tools for implementing targeted aggregation, as well as differentiated, comprehensible and assessable representations of company activities, help prevent those responsible for plant maintenance from being flooded with details, thereby enabling them to concentrate more on technical improvement considerations. The comprehensive functionalities of SAP R/3 and the PM component will ensure targeted support for this welcome trend.

Leoben, January 2000
Jurgen Wolfbauer
Professor of Business Administration
and Industrial Management
Montanuniversitat Leoben, Austria

Preface III

KEEPING THE ROLLING STOCK ROLLING

It is now a good few years since we at the transport companies of VOEST ALPINE Stahl Linz (Austria) realized that IT support was essential for repairing our own and external rolling stock efficiently. Back then, we tested the SAP RM-INST, which was still in its infancy, and came to the conclusion that it did not meet our specific requirements. The reason? Our plant maintenance processes (surprise, surprise) were totally different from those of other companies. Quick as a flash, we set two students to the task of developing a tailor-made system for making quotations and creating maintenance task lists.

The years went by, technology rolled inexorably on, modern systems were installed throughout the company, and our process flows were optimized. Throughout the company, SAP applications were installed, and more and more interfaces had to be developed and maintained, until . . . well, until our system could no longer cope. By this time, the original developers had disappeared without trace, and our IT solution was creating more problems than it solved. Nothing matched up with anything else; we had reached the stage where we had to work in several systems to process business orders; and the problems were getting out of control.

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT SAP R/3. COULD THIS BE THE SOLUTION FOR US?

The answer is, of course, yes! It did not take long to convince our transport personnel of the benefits of the SAP R/3 Service Management and Plant Maintenance modules for their day-to-day work. Soon everyone was asking: if other people are satisfied with the system, why can't we use it too? After all, we already had the system in-house; we 'only' needed to implement it, didn't we?

We soon put together a team, which faced up to the challenge and got to work on putting ideas and potential improvements into practice. In addition to ensuring a friendly atmosphere, the project leader made sure that the team worked as a team. Not even a change in market requirements, which radically changed the direction of the project, could dampen the team's spirit. The plant maintenance personnel soon realized that the Plant Maintenance module contained everything they needed to carry out their work -- and that our plant maintenance processes were not so different from those of other companies after all. With support from SAP, our highly motivated team achieved its goals and the users are more than satisfied with the result. They now work in one thoroughly stable, integrated system, and cannot imagine working any other way.

We can now honestly say that our decision was the right one. By opting for the PM component, we have invested in the future. Keeping up with the pace of development demands a constant supply of up-to-the-minute expertise. Our decision in favour of R/3 has not only provided us with a state-of-the-art system, it also ensures us further development by SAP.

Linz, January 2000
Peter Ustupsky
Information Systems (Production)

0201675323P07032001

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201675323
• ISBN 13: 9780201675320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368