Explaining Technical Asset Structures

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Explain key principles of Technical Assets Structuring.

Explaining Organizational Levels

Before you can model your asset structure, you must be aware of the organizational setup of your company, especially regarding the various teams in Asset Management, such as maintenance planners or maintenance technicians, who are usually organized in maintenance work centers.

Depending on the structure of your company, maintenance planning is either plant-based (decentralized) or cross-plant (centralized). After you have clarified the structure of your organization, you want to make the necessary additions from a maintenance perspective in Customizing for the SAP system.

See the following video to learn more about the sequence for defining the organizational levels.

Organizational Levels

See the following video to learn more about the structured organizational levels.

The organizational levels are structured as follows:

Maintenance Work Centers

A work center is an organizational unit where work can be carried out. With regard to Asset Management, work centers are usually groups of persons or individual persons.

In Asset Management, work centers are used either as responsible work centers or executing work centers.

Work centers belong to the master data and provide the capacity that is required to perform a task.

Work center links provide the connection between work centers and other objects in the SAP system. You can link a work center to the following objects:

  • Cost center
  • Qualifications
  • Positions
  • People

Modeling Technical Assets

In a company, you first need to decide which technical systems and buildings are relevant for maintenance and need mapping in the system. You need to use functional locations to map more complex technical systems, equipment to map individual objects, and maintenance bills of material to map spare parts.

See the following video to learn more about the steps sequence for structuring of technical systems.

Functional Location

See the following video to learn more about the functional location.

The aim of creating a functional location is to structure a technical system or building into units that are relevant for plant maintenance. When you create a functional location, it takes on the function of the location where individual objects (such as engines, gearboxes, pumps, and so on) can be installed. In such cases, you can view removal and installation locations both from the point of view of the installation location, and also from the point of view of the individual installed or removed object.

You can use functional locations to structure your systems based on the following conditions:

  • The structures of the technical systems in your company have to be represented according to functional criteria.

  • The maintenance tasks have to be performed for certain parts of your technical system and this work must be recorded.

  • The technical data for certain parts of your technical system has to be stored and evaluated over a long period of time.

  • The costs of maintenance tasks have to be monitored for certain parts of your technical system.

  • The effects of the usage conditions on the probability of damage to the installed equipment have to be analyzed.

The structure of a functional location is based on the structure indicator.

If you create a new functional location, the system checks whether a hierarchy with this structure indicator already exists, and whether the new identification is suitable for the existing hierarchy. If so, when the new functional location is created, it is included in the existing structure.

How to Display a Functional Location Structure and Master

DemoStart Demo

Equipment

Individual objects that can be a part of bigger technical structures, and for which a separate maintenance history must be constructed, are mapped by using equipment.

Criteria for Creation of Equipment

  • You need to manage individual data for the object.

  • When breakdown, planned, or preventive maintenance tasks are required for an object, you need to record the maintenance tasks.

  • You need to collect and evaluate technical data for the object over long periods of time.

  • You need to monitor the costs of maintenance tasks for the object.

  • You need to record the usage time of the object at functional locations.

Note

If you want to put a piece of equipment on stock – for example because it is defective and you want to refurbish it - you first have to assign a Serial Number.

A serial number is an individual, single part within a stock of a material number - and therefore can be combined with a piece of equipment.

With the combination of an equipment and a serial number, you can handle an individual, physical part, not only in Asset Management and Service, but also in Materials Management and other areas.

Bills of Material (BOM)

See the following video to learn more about the BOM in asset management.

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