Maintenance Rules and Alerts Management
Asset Health Monitoring, as a part of SAP Asset Performance Management, helps organizations to monitor the condition and performance of their assets in real-time. This allows organizations to proactively detect potential issues with their assets and take action to prevent downtime and costly repairs. The solution uses sensors and data analysis to provide insights into the health of assets, allowing for predictive maintenance and better asset utilization. Asset Health Monitoring enables organizations to optimize their maintenance strategies, improve asset reliability, and reduce maintenance costs. It enables organizations to make informed decisions about their assets, leading to increased operational efficiency and improved overall asset performance.
To understand how maintenance rules and alerts interact and support maintenance processes, we first need to look at terminology. Higher-level maintenance rules refer to a set of guidelines and procedures that help organizations effectively manage and perform maintenance activities on their assets. These rules are designed to ensure that assets are properly maintained and kept in optimal condition to maximize their lifespan and performance. Rules are used to create conditions and actions for monitoring and maintaining assets. The rules can apply to a fixed or dynamic data set and include if conditions, calculation formulas, output indicators, and scheduling selections. Once released, the system will monitor the data and trigger the rules to evaluate and execute the specified actions. There are four distinct types of rules, each triggering when different criteria are met.
Rule Types
| Rule Type | Description | Trigger | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculation Rule | A rule that allows us to take the data from a technical object, and when any of their values change (for example, a new indicator value arrives), uses a formula to calculate a new value for another indicator of this technical object. These rules are useful, for example, for calculating an index, or any other derived value from the raw data. | This rule gets triggered when a new indicator value for any of its operands in the calculation has arrived. | The thickness of a pipe is measured at regular intervals. Based on these measurements, a corrosion rate can be calculated using a formula. On January 1, 2020, the thickness was measured at 34 mm. On January 1, 2024, the most recent thickness measurement was 30 mm. Corrosion Rate: (Oldest Thickness Measurement - Newest Thickness Measurement) ÷ (Date of Newest Thickness Measurement - Date of Oldest Thickness Measurement) Corrosion Rate: (34 - 30) ÷ (January 1, 2021 - January 1, 2016) = 4 ÷ 5 = 0.8 millimeter per year |
| Aggregation Rule | A rule that allows one to use one indicator that is common across all subordinate technical objects and aggregate it up to an indicator of the parent technical objects. The aggregations can be the minimum, maximum, or average of all the children values. Such a rule is useful for quickly getting an overview of all the children values, by just looking at the parent value. | This rule gets triggered if there is a new value for the children indicator. | If there are three child technical objects and they have an indicator to measure the corrosion rate of each child, then for a parent technical object, for example,
then in the parent technical object, the maximum corrosion rate of any of the children can be stored. Parent technical object corrosion Rate: Maximum (Corrosion Rate of Child Objects) = 0.8 millimeter per year. |
| Scheduled Rule | A rule that operates on a schedule (for example, every day at noon). At that time, it will use a formula against the data of the technical object, and if the condition is true, create a notification with optional task list. | This rule gets triggered when the time according to a schedule (for example, "every day at noon") has arrived. | Define the following:
In this example, the scheduled rule will be executed every day at 11:00 PM starting on January 01, 2024. |
| Streaming Rule | A rule that has the same input as a calculation rule, but instead of a new indicator value, it produces alerts and/or notifications. | They are triggered by new indicator values. | An alert and/or a notification is supposed to be created when one of these conditions exists:
|
Alerts are the outcome of a rule that has been triggered. Alerts generated from rule-based condition monitoring of technical objects are usually done on time series Indicator data. Alerts created from these sensor data give you information about the condition of the technical object. The information provided helps you with any potential failure that may occur or has already occurred for the technical object and helps to identify potential actions to be taken for the incoming alerts. One such action could be the creation of a maintenance notification within SAP Asset Performance Management. Users can manually create maintenance notifications from SAP Asset Performance Management alerts. This will help in preventing any potential failure that may occur in any assets, which in turn helps in proactively minimizing the downtime of the assets. The notifications are created in SAP Asset Performance Management and are synchronized to the SAP S/4HANA system.