Executing Strategy Assessments in SAP Asset Performance Management

1. Strategy Assessments for Classes: A high-level evaluation process designed to manage maintenance strategies across all assets within a particular class.
2. Class: A grouping within SAP APM used to categorize technical objects like equipment or functional locations, often based on shared characteristics or operating conditions.
3. Characteristics: Defined attributes within a class that describe and differentiate the objects it includes, such as maximum flow rating or design conditions for a centrifugal pump.
4. Operating Context and Condition: The specific usage and environmental conditions under which technical objects operate, which may affect maintenance strategy assessments.
5. Failure Data Profile: Includes Maintainable Items, Failure Modes, Failure Mechanisms, Causes, and Failure Effects used to assess and formulate maintenance strategies within a class.
6. Maintainable Items: Parts or assemblies identified during the strategy assessment that require maintenance.
7. Failure Modes: Specific ways in which an asset might fail, necessary for understanding potential asset failures within a class.
8. Failure Mechanisms: The processes that cause the asset to fail in the identified mode.
9. Causes: The circumstances or factors that trigger a failure mechanism.
10. Failure Effects: The consequences or impact of an asset's failure mode on its operation or function.
11. Recommendations: Proposed actions or changes derived from the strategy assessment to enhance maintenance strategies and reduce or mitigate failure impacts.
12. Maintenance Activities: Actions suggested to preserve asset integrity, subdivided into Proactive Maintenance Activities (preventive or predictive) and Reactive Maintenance Activities (post-failure).
13. Proactive Maintenance Activities: Scheduled interventions to prevent failures, categorized into Calendar-based, Performance-based, and Condition-based activities.
14. Reactive Maintenance Activities: Tasks performed after a failure has occurred to restore the asset to its normal working condition.
15. Improvement Activities: Non-maintenance recommendations that can positively impact asset reliability, such as training or process changes.

This lesson covers the functionalities available in SAP Asset Performance Management (SAP APM) to enable the performance of Strategy Assessments for Classes. This type of assessment is designed to be executed at higher level than a Risk and Criticality Analysis or Reliability Centered Maintenance assessment, which are both commonly executed at the equipment or functional location level. Strategy Assessments for Classes, as the name suggest, are intended to help evaluate and manage maintenance strategies at a high level for all assets that fall in a certain class.

Video Summary

Learn about SAP Asset Performance Management and Asset Reliability Engineering. Discover how to develop maintenance strategies and recommendations to mitigate the risks of failure.

The graphic above illustrates the high-level process of creating and executing a Strategy Assessment for Classes.

The first key to understanding Strategy Assessment for Classes is to understand what a class is in the context of SAP APM. As described in Lesson 4, classes in APM are actually equivalent to and replicated from classes in SAP S/4HANA. In the context of enterprise asset management and SAP APM, Classes are most commonly applied to Equipment or Functional Locations, but can be applied to materials as well. Characteristics can be defined within each class. For every object the class is assigned to, values can be maintained for the characteristics that have been defined within the class.

This allows the user to maintain additional data related to each object and allows for grouping of like objects. As an example, an organization may use centrifugal pumps from a variety of manufacturers in a variety of different sizes, capacities and which are designed for different operating conditions. Despite the differences, they may all be assigned to a centrifugal pump class. That class could include characteristics for maximum flow rating, maximum pressure rating, current draw requirements, sizing specifications, design conditions, etc.

For Strategy Assessments for Classes in SAP APM, assessments are done at the class level, so that is the first selection that is made. In the pump example, the Centrifugal Pump class would be selected, so that an assessment can be done across the entire class, which the characteristics withing the class can be used to define specific Operating Contexts and Conditions to be considered separately. This allows for separate assessment of pumps operating, for example, in a situation where they are submerged in a clean fluid versus submerges in a dirty fluid, etc. The assessment will still potentially cover a variety of actual equipment, but all will share the general class grouping and the specific operating context.

This allows for efficient assessment of maintenance strategies covering like equipment in similar situations.

The Lesson about the Failure Data Model provides detail on the failure data model used in SAP APM, including how the failure data model is used for Strategy Assessments for Classes specifically.

Once a user has selected a class and optionally defined the Operating Contexts and Conditions to be assessed, the user can then complete the Failure Data Profile information. For Strategy Assessment for Classes, this includes Maintainable Items, Failure Modes, Failure Mechanisms, Causes, and Failure Effects. Of these, only failure modes are required to complete the assessment. The remaining items in the Failure Date Profile are optional but allow for more detailed and narrowly focused maintenance recommendations to be defined.

Recommendations are the key outcome of Strategy Assessments for Classes, and for the other assessment types available in SAP APM as well. Recommendations in APM are intended to allow users to propose actions or changes to maintenance strategies to reduce the chances of or mitigate the impacts of failures.

Recommendations are broken into two main types of proposed activities: Maintenance Activities and Improvement Activities. Maintenance activities are further broken down into Proactive Maintenance Activities and Reactive Maintenance Activities. Proactive maintenance activities are intended to prevent asset failure through preventive maintenance activities or through predictive maintenance programs. Proactive maintenance activities fall into one of three categories in SAP APM: Calendar, Performance, and Condition.

Calendar-based proactive maintenance activities are scheduled based on time. For example, a maintenance plan for a pump may include a standard service every 6 months.

Performance-based proactive maintenance activities are conducted based on asset usage. For example, a maintenance plan for the same pump might include lubrication and seal replacement every 1,000 hours of runtime, or after every 100,000 liters of throughput.

Condition-based proactive maintenance activities are conducted based on near-real-time monitoring of actual conditions against thresholds. This type of maintenance strategy can be used when a precise calendar or usage-based interval is difficult to determine or may be overly conservative, but where it is possible to monitor conditions that are predictive of potential failures. In the pump example, vibration monitors may be able to determine when bearings are beginning to approach failure, or electrical current and flow monitors may be able to indicate when the pump is becoming less efficient, indicating that a failure may be developing.

Reactive maintenance does not attempt to avoid failure, but instead refers to maintenance activities which occur after a failure in order to bring an asset back into normal working condition. In some cases, assessments may determine that run to failure is the appropriate maintenance strategy, in which case reactive maintenance would be the appropriate recommendation.

Improvement activities are different from maintenance activities in that they do not involve direct maintenance tasks, but instead are related to other types of actions that positively impact asset reliability. These actions could include technical or administrative training activities, changes to products or equipment to better fit the requirements, process changes, required changes due to regulation, etc. Essentially, this category can be used for any recommended actions that do not immediately fit into one of the two maintenance categories.

Strategy Assessments for Classes are a tool in SAP APM to allow users to evaluate maintenance strategies and develop recommended for entire classes of similar assets at one time. Strategy Assessments for Classes leverage the SAP APM failure date profile, which is referred to as a catalog profile in SAP S/4HANA to characterize the types of assets and failures for which the recommendations relevant. Recommendations are the outcome of the assessment, which can then be used to drive maintenance plans and other activities.