SAP : Why Healthy Assets Mean a Healthy Company

Manufacturing companies own many complex assets, which run continuously throughout the year and need constant supervision. How can they reduce maintenance costs and improve production?

Could they put sensors on each asset to monitor their health? This is already in practice. Problems arise when communicating the health of an asset with many employees and managers. Companies need to be able to send accurate asset information to everyone involved in the process.

What if each sensor is connected to a computer, could it send push notifications? This only solves one problem; monitoring the performance or efficiency of an asset is only half the battle. Sensors alone do not tell when the asset needs to be maintained or replaced.

How can maintenance processes easier and faster? With computer software that constantly runs checks on each asset, when the software detects something wrong, it will alert the on-site manager. The manager could then predict or estimate when the specific asset needs to be repaired.

SAP Leonardo for Discrete Manufacturing, service and assets option, can help manufacturing companies by improving overall equipment effectiveness, which will lead into improved customer satisfaction. The kit can help improve asset uptime, which means faster turnaround times. It can also help reduce maintenance efforts and costs.

With SAP Analytics, the kit can gather data from each asset. That data then gets sent to the cloud where it is processed through SAP Predictive Maintenance and Services. The information gets thrown into an algorithm that provides a health report on a specific asset. The report could include information like an asset's temperature, rate of production, and availability. Based on the data from the health report, managers can determine when assets need to be maintained.

A company that normally runs a monthly maintenance check could add assets that need maintenance to the original maintenance schedule, avoiding the need to make a separate appointment for it. In addition, companies would have a better understanding of asset uptime and downtime. And with the service and assets option, companies can reduce both total asset down time and total maintenance costs. By minimizing total down time, asset performance will increase as more assets are in good working health.

Ulf Guttmann, solution manager at SAP, explains: 'People try to achieve the highest performance and availability through constant maintenance checks. We help them by connecting the machine via the Internet of Things to always have a view on the health of the machine. The predictive maintenance system will notify a maintenance engineer about an issue before the machine breaks.'

The power to predict failure before it happens is extremely valuable. It is often less costly to pro-actively fix or replace an asset then to clean up after a failure, when the impact often extends beyond the asset in question. Companies can save money, keep on-site employees safer, and make sure customers are satisfied.

SAP Leonardo for Discrete Manufacturing, service and assets option, can help simplify the maintenance processes. It can also reduce maintenance costs and improve asset performance and availability. The added benefit of an increase in production can lead to improved customer satisfaction as well due to faster turnaround times.

Learn more about the service and assets option here.