Exploring SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, asset management

The key challenges in asset management are as follows:

• Unplanned downtime, outages, and decreased asset availability and reliability.
• Low return on assets, lack of compliance and risk management, and inefficient maintenance spend.
• Inaccurate asset master data that can cause inefficiency and incidents.
• Data and information stored in multiple information systems.
• Decision-makers and workers not enabled with decisive knowledge at hand.

To transform, businesses must pursue the following strategic priorities:

• Manage cost, risk, and performance holistically.
• Balance operating expenditures (OPEX) and capital expenditures (CAPEX).
• Monitor and predict performance of assets, people, and processes.
• Bring operational data in a business context and create decisive knowledge.
• Collaborate with engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition Asset Management solution allows organizations to manage their asset-related cost, risk, and performance holistically.

Organizations can implement proactive maintenance strategies that are enriched with the analysis of real-time data, as well as predictive and other forecasting methods, to increase the return on assets and reduce unplanned downtimes. The solution helps in bridging the operational silos by integrating processes from top floor to shop floor, as well as managing the complete asset lifecycle.

Some of the key benefits of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition Asset Management are:

• Provides real-time insights into asset performance data for timely, relevant decisions.
• Enables use of prediction, simulation, and analysis to evaluate asset behavior, plan budgets, and forecast maintenance cost.
• Provides a common view of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) data for a holistic asset management system approach as outlined in ISO 55001.
• Supports and promotes proactively managing asset-related risks to minimize disruption.
• Enables access to one common view on process risks related to workers, assets, or the environment.
• Facilitates the use of analysis, prediction, and simulation, to achieve greater insight, for example, converting incident reporting and risk assessments into actionable knowledge.
• Integrates fully with the capabilities of S/4HANA Enterprise in the areas of finance, human resources, manufacturing, materials management, and so on.

Accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for faster time to value, using best practice business processes with the knowledge of being legally compliant in different countries. The SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition provide preconfigured content for core business processes in EAM and other modules such as finance, sourcing and procurement, manufacturing, sales, and supply chain. In addition, the cloud offers SAP Best Practices for integration to other cloud solutions, such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Ariba.

The benefits of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition include the following:

• Reduce cost of operations by using standardized processes.

• Manage multiple geographies, divisions, subsidiaries, and ledgers with global and country specific content.

• Drive operational efficiencies and comply with regulations.

• Empower business and IT users equally with guided configuration.

• Allow a first-hand experience of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition with instant guided trials.

• Update and change customer specific configuration using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition lifecycle management tool.

Asset Management handles all maintenance activities like to find the damages, identify causes, and take actions to repair technical objects as well as perform preventive maintenance. To perform these activities, it contains sub-modules for the following:

• Management of technical objects and equipment master record.

• Planning of maintenance task.

• Management of workflow notifications and work orders under maintenance order management.

Asset information is needed in many different departments and is fundamental for many business processes. An enterprise must have a common system of reference to identify all of its assets, for example, to fulfill corporate governance regulations. This is done by creating unique master records for each technical object and is the base for structuring asset data and information.

SAP S/4HANA Asset Management enables you to plan and perform the maintenance of operational systems, such as machines or production installations. It comprises the inspection, maintenance, and repair measures that need to be taken to keep your assets in working order. These activities are typically performed by maintenance planners and maintenance workers.

Watch the video to learn more about the key features in asset management.

SAP is continuously improving the features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud by enhancing existing features and adding new ones. From time to time, we also need to renovate features and therefore replace and deprecate old apps or objects. To keep you informed about such changes to your application, we use What’s New information to communicate the changes.

The What’s New Viewer is an interactive table that provides a first overview of all information about innovations, changes, and deprecations available for a specific version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

In the Short Description column, you will find a link that leads you to the What’s New document. This document includes information already available in the What’s New Viewer table, as well as more detailed information on the changes and required actions, giving you an overall picture of what you need to know.

Please note that you can select innovations by using filter Line of Business - f.ex. Asset Management.

The What's New can be accessed from the SAP Help Portal: https://help.sap.com/whats-new/7d3d11840a6543329e72391cf4d48e2d?Line_of_Business=Asset+Management

You can accelerate and simplify the adoption of SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management in the cloud for faster time to value, using best practice business processes with the knowledge that you are legally compliant in different countries.

SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition is a key component of the SAP Activate innovation adoption framework. SAP Best Practices provides ready-to-run business processes optimized for SAP S/4HANA, thus supporting customers with various system requirements or maintenance scenarios. SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition includes a selection of scope items covering the scope of pre-configured ready-to-run business processes so that you can choose the capabilities and options of the solution, such as business processes, analytic content, and so on.

Scope items are typically predefined business processes, such as sales order processing. They represent a best practice implementation choice for a customer. Each scope item has a set of accelerators delivering detailed documentation that is used during the implementation project. Each scope item has a unique ID that makes it easy to identify, for example, 4HH or 43R.

• Maintenance Management
• Asset Operations and Maintenance
• Environment, Health and Safety

The scope items listed in this topic are deprecated. They are no longer offered for scoping and cannot be requested for activation.

• Corrective Maintenance (BH1)
• Emergency Maintenance (BH2)
• Preventive Maintenance (BJ2)
• Integration with Asset Central Foundation 3YE

We recommend to use the successor scope items as follows

If the scope items are active, your existing configuration settings related to the scope items will not be deleted and not updated by SAP. Individual features and functions described by these scope items may still be usable (deprecated features and functions are documented separately). Customers interested in the capabilities of these scope items are therefore recommended to opt for the successor scope items (when available). In case of questions, you may also contact your SAP Account Executive.

The scope item Corrective Maintenance (BH1) allows you to perform the corrective maintenance of technical objects when a breakdown or failure occurs. The plant maintenance component provides a comprehensive notification and order system to facilitate this process. You process a repair using several planning stages, such as preliminary costing, work scheduling, material provision, resource planning, and permits. You also react immediately to issues that may lead to the shutdown of production facilities. When this is necessary, as a Maintenance Technician, you create the required maintenance work orders and shop papers with a minimum of entries in the shortest possible time

This scope item uses order recording after an event to log unforeseen and urgent maintenance work by creating and confirming an order in the same operation. The technician can identify an issue affecting a piece of equipment, immediately fix the issue, and later report the time spent and the material consumed. It can then be used for planning objects (such as maintenance orders) and for actual recording (order confirmation, notification data, and goods movements). Planned data does not differ from the actual data, which is the work recorded on an operation corresponding to the confirmed actual work. The order is created, released, and if required, technically completed. In addition, you can install, dismantle, or replace pieces of equipment.

The Preventive Maintenance (BJ2) scope item describes the processes you perform to prevent system breakdowns or breakdowns of other objects that have high repair costs. Such breakdowns result in greater costs due to production downtime. Preventive maintenance supports processes for planning on the scope and time of maintenance work for inspections, maintenance, and repairs. The quality of manufactured products is substantially affected by the operational condition of the production plant. There is a requirement for quality assurance to be more cost effective to maintain objects regularly and in return avoid a more expensive breakdown.

This scope item has been deprecated as of cloud release 2508.

It was used to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition with Asset Central Foundation for key master data and organizational data that is required to run asset management processes cloud solutions SAP Business Network Collaboration (SAP BNAC) and SAP Asset Performance Management (SAP APM).

Generative AI

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence models designed to generate new content in the form of written text, audio, images, or videos. Applications and use cases are far and wide. Generative AI can be used to create a short story based on the style of a particular author, generate a realistic image of a person who doesn't exist, compose a symphony in the style of a famous composer, or create a video clip from a simple textual description.

To better understand the uniqueness of generative AI, it is helpful to understand how it differs from other types of AI, programming, and machine learning:

• Traditional AI refers to AI systems that can perform specific tasks by following predetermined rules or algorithms. They are primarily rule-based systems that can't learn from data or improve over time. Generative AI, on the other hand, can learn from data and generate new data instances
• Machine Learning enables a system to learn from data rather than through explicit programming. In other words, machine learning is the process where a computer program can adapt to and learn from new data independently, resulting in the discovery of trends and insights. Generative AI makes use of machine learning techniques to learn from and create new data.
• Conversational AI enables machines to understand and respond to human language in a human-like manner. While generative AI and conversational AI may seem similar – particularly when generative AI is used to generate human-like text – their primary difference lies in their purpose. Conversational AI is used to create interactive systems that can engage in human-like dialogue, whereas generative AI is broader, encompassing the creation of various data types, not just text.
• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to highly autonomous systems – currently hypothetical – that can outperform humans at most economically valuable work. If realized, AGI would be able to understand, learn, adapt, and implement knowledge across a wide range of tasks. While generative AI can be a component of such systems, it's not equivalent to AGI. Generative AI focuses on creating new data instances, whereas AGI denotes a broader level of autonomy and capability.

Predictive AI

Predictive artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the use of machine learning to identify patterns in past events and make predictions about future events.

Predictive Artificial Intelligence is a computer program's ability to use statistical analysis to identify patterns, anticipate behaviors, and forecast future events. The field of statistics has long been used to make predictions about the future; predictive AI makes statistical analysis faster and (theoretically) more accurate via machine learning and access to vast amounts of data. While its predictions are not guaranteed to be correct, predictive AI can help businesses prepare for the future and personalize experiences for their customers.

SAP Asset Performance Management (APM) - AI Based Predictive Maintenance

SAP APM empowers asset owners, plant managers, and reliability engineers to optimize maintenance strategies, to measure and improve asset performance, and to follow through on your sustainability objectives.

It minimizes the risk of asset failure and allows to make faster, more-accurate maintenance decisions. With SAP APM you can analyze IoT sensor data and maintenance records, monitor equipment behavior remotely, and gain greater insight through AI.

AI-based predictive maintenance includes:

• Determining the failure curve of equipment based on failure probabilities
• Estimating the remaining useful life of equipment

To learn more about the SAP APM solution follow the learning journey for SAP APM from the link.https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/managing-sap-asset-performance-management

Joule in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition for Asset Management

Joule offers conversational interactions between humans and computers to simplify access to information and automate business processes, thus improving both the employee and customer satisfaction. Joule can direct you to the right application to complete your tasks, help you to complete certain tasks, and find the information you're looking for quickly and easily.

You can ask Joule to display business objects using natural language in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for Asset Management e.g.:

• Work Center
• Maintenance Order
• Material
• Bill of Material

To learn more about Joule capabilities available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition refer to the following link: Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition | SAP Help Portal

To learn more on the SAP AI services and in general about AI refer to the linkhttps://help.sap.com/docs/ai-serviceshttps://help.sap.com/docs/artificial-intelligence