Exploring SAP Asset Management

A modern Enterprise Asset Management has to deal with a variety of different aspects and dimensions. The main goal, however, is always to optimize asset health and performance - at the lowest possible cost.

To achieve this goal in an increasingly complex world with a constantly growing digitization it is necessary to closely align business processes, business software and the cooperation with partners.

In the sense of a holistic approach to enterprise asset management handling the complete lifecycle of a technical asset is of special interest. This lifecycle must be analyzed at the beginning of a software implementation and modeled using tightly integrated applications.

Generally speaking the following phases can be identified:

1. Investment planning

   Collect details for planned investment and distribute budget.

2. Project Definition

   Define scope and structure of project.

3. Selection of vendors

   Invite bids and select vendors.

4. Project execution

   Plan, control, and monitor the cross-company project.

5. Worker Safety

   Define and monitor risks, provide safety during maintenance execution

6. Plant Maintenance / Maintenance Execution

   Plan and perform maintenance tasks for a defined asset structure

7. External procurement

   Procure external services and material.

8. Shutdown

   Ensure an orderly and compliant disposal of technical asset.

9. Performance Management

   Monitor performance from both a technical and a financial perspective.

As an answer to the challenges mentioned SAP Asset Management offers the following solutions:

• SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM)

  SAP Intelligent Asset Management is a set of cloud-based solutions and is based on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). It currently comprises SAP Asset Intelligence Network(AIN), SAP Asset Performance Management (APM) and SAP Service and Asset Manager.

  One of the major goals of SAP Intelligent Asset Management is to enable an IT driven (data science & rules driven) approach to predictive maintenance in order to reduce unplanned failures and the number of overall maintenance actions.

• SAP S/4HANA Asset Management Public Cloud

• SAP S/4HANA Asset Management Private Cloud / On Premise

• SAP Service and Asset Manager (Mobile)

• SAP S/4HANA Asset Management for Resource Scheduling (RSH)

SAP S/4HANA Asset Management is integrated with numerous other applications which in many cases allows automatic detection of relevant business objects or automatic posting of documents.

Examples:

• Asset Accounting - assign asset number to piece of equipment of functional location.
• Controlling - automatically detect relevant activity types, automatically calculate planned and actual costs.
• Financial Accounting - automatically post relevant accounts during a material withdrawal for a maintenance order.
• Human Resources - use HR personnel numbers for planning, automatically detect working and non-working times.
• Investment Management - integrate maintenance orders with investment programs and/or investment projects.
• Project Management - create maintenance projects such as shutdown projects.
• (Flexible) Real Estate - assign functional locations to architectural or business view.
• Materials Management - automatic reservations for stock material, procure material and services.
• Production - integrate technical objects with production work centers.

SAP S/4HANA supports different UI client types:

• SAP Fiori Launchpad
• SAP GUI for Windows (On Premise only)
• SAP GUI for HTML
• SAP Business Client (for Desktop / for HTML)

SAP Fiori Launchpad is a role-based, personalized UI client which can be deployed on different device types and platforms. It is browser-based and consists of Tile Groups which can be flexibly put together based on Tile Catalogs. Which tile catalogs are available for which user is determined via the role assignment on the Frontend Server (FES).

However, it is also possible to integrate the frontend server into the backend server. In this case you have the Embedded model.