Tough economic conditions and uncertain markets are placing pressure on companies to maximise their returns on assets. To compete in a globalised market, asset-intensive industries must achieve operational and maintenance excellence, while focusing on sustainable operations and managing risks to performance, worker safety and the environment. Eleanor Reader reports.
SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) has been a priority for the company over the last couple of years and is gaining even more momentum in 2013.
SAP’s strategy in the EAM space is to combine 3D visualisation, high-speed analytics and mobility to provide asset managers and maintenance workers with all the information they need in the right format at their fingertips.
Peter Dunford, managing director of Vesta Partners Australia Asia Pacific, says there has been an increase in interest in EAM coming out of SAP over the last few years, which may be a reaction to the C-suite being held accountable for the performance, safety and environmental compliance of their company’s assets.
“Today more than ever the management of larger organisations, particularly those in asset-intensive industries, are placing a higher focus on trying to increase productivity and getting more out of their assets and equipment through better availability and reliability,” he says.
The latest developments in SAP EAM support the entire lifecycle of physical assets, including planning capital expenditure, design, construction, operation maintenance, retirement or replacement of assets and reporting.
“A decade ago when you were talking about asset management, people thought you were just talking about maintenance. Now people are starting to understand the value of considering the whole lifecycle of the asset – it’s not just about the cost of maintenance, it’s about what you can do to get more from your assets,” says Dunford.
In Australia, large organisations in particular are trying to move towards standardising their business processes, and therefore their asset management processes, and then supporting that with one integrated system.
“In South East Asia, there’s an opportunity there to get the market to start to understand the value of having an integrated system, something that’s able to support their whole business needs,” says Dunford.
However, he adds that it would appear SAP is struggling to compete in the Asian market against some of the best of breed maintenance and computerised management systems, such as IBM Maximo Asset Management.
“We need to get better at explaining to business people how integrated SAP EAM can support and add significant value in the industry.”
Going mobile
Mobility has been the hot topic of the EAM world for at least 18 months, says Simon Miller, solution advisor, SAP Australia and New Zealand, with many customers actively investigating the options available.
“Since the inception of the iPhone, iPad and Android equivalents, people’s expectations of what they could be able to do and should be able to do is remarkably different. In the end, they just want to do their job as quickly and easily possible,” he says.
Mobility gives organisations the ability to put information in workers’ hands out in the field, which decreases the need for and amount of paper, decreases the cycle times to get maintenance operations done, and also ensures there’s a much higher chance of getting accurate information back in a timely manner, says Dunford.
“SAP now seems to have a clear strategy in the direction they’re going with sending real-time information into thefield, and collecting real-time information from the field and enhancing that,” he says.
To strengthen its mobile presence, SAP acquired the enterprise mobile app platform provider, Syclo, in 2012.
The acquisition has brought two key advantages to SAP, says Miller – the first being that now SAP actually has a product to do mobile work management.
“You can buy it from us and we can install it and it works; it’s not a case of you buying the tools and developing it yourself. Most people we speak to come to us because they want to buy something ‘out-of-the-box’, they don’t want to be a software development house,” he says.
Syclo applications available on Mobile Asset Management include SAP Work Manager by Syclo, SAP Rounds Manager by Syclo and SAP Inventory Manager by Syclo.
Syclo also gives SAP the capability to customise applications for different work groups that have different requirements.
“We can use those technological components to easily configure without programming a new workflow, so that the application follows exactly the task people are doing, how they’re doing it in the order they’re doing it, and captures the information. It can then also display the information they need exactly in the right place at the right time,” Miller says.
Latest innovations
The introduction of SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Packs 5 and 6 in 2010 and 2011 sparked new innovations in the SAP EAM space.
During these years, key improvements were realised with innovations in all major SAP EAM solution areas, including linear asset management, risk assessment, worker safety, work permits, scheduling, analytics, new user interface, visualisation and GIS integration.
Asset analytics continues to be at the forefront of the EAM industry.
“Being able to present the information about performance of assets in real-time to maintenance, operations and asset managers is much more doable now. It is enabling organisations to make decisions in a more timely manner about what they’re doing to maintain and operate their assets,” says Dunford.
SAP is currently developing a predictive asset analytics product that will run on SAP HANA, says Miller, who suggests the product has the potential to be a game-changer.
“If you look at what data is available through the plant systems, for example, it’s actually massive. And so now that we’ve got good technology, it’s not a problem to have all that data available – once you put an algorithm over it, you can crunch through that data and get an answer really, really quickly.”
Linear asset management for the utilities, rail and transport industries is also now very well catered for in SAP, says Dunford.
“Organisations that have linear assets can now set up their assets in a spatial manner rather than just a hierarchical manner, which gives them much better support for how they build, maintain and evaluate their assets in running their business,” he says.
Geospatial capabilities
Esri and SAP collaborated on the development of a product called Geo.e, which stands for Geographical Enablement of SAP ERP. It is a GIS (Geographical Information System) that provides geospatial capability inside SAP.
GIS technology maps the geography of an organisation’s data to expose patterns and relationships otherwise hidden in the information labyrinths of numeric tables and databases, and then visually represents that data on a map.
Before Geo.e was launched, it was very common for many organisations to integrate SAP and Esri through large custom development methods. This approach worked, but created complexity in the technical plumbing, data models and business processes, because they had to go back and forth between the SAP and Esri systems and duplicate any changes made in either system.
Additionally, because the two systems were hard wired, every three to four years many of these companies would go through major technological refreshes to take advantage of new versions of technology or add new business processes.
“Geo.e removes that complexity and duplication and gives the organisation the agility to embed the ‘where’ where it makes sense, and not try to force people to access this information outside SAP,” says Francisco Urbina, manager, alliances and partners, Esri Australia.
Geo.e provides an operational dashboard to define the assets, the conditions and the work orders that need to be performed against them. The original concept behind the solution was to accurately generate those work orders against assets and then to distribute the work orders to the workforce.
“A lot of the smarter organisations are starting to focus on using analytics against the geospatial records and starting to identify trends and building analytics around failure analysis or condition monitoring,” says Urbina.
“You reduce costs because you’re not doing poor planning around delivery of maintenance services, and you reduce back office support because your assets aren’t failing as often, so you’re not having those emergency events occurring as often.”
Geo.e is focused on Real Estate Asset Management, Enterprise Asset Management and Linear Asset Management, however it also supports HANA. Innovations in the future will include Esri Maps for BusinessObjects and support for Syclo are in the Geo.e frame.
“All of these pieces are going to conform to a standard architecture and pattern, so the BusinessObjects person can actually query the Geo.e maps, while being managed inside of HANA, which will also have live updates from the Syclo mobile field force,” says Urbina.
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Winter 2013.
