The data and functions of all maintenance procedures performed within a company can be fully inter-connected. The openness of the R/3 System enables you to use external systems that are integrated with the PM component, such as geographical information systems (GIS), computer-aided design (CAD) systems and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
The benefits of the SAP Plant Maintenance are as follows :
- It automates the process of performing facility repair and maintenance requests. For example, SAP records a problem that is reported, labor and materials are planned, costs are recorded, and then costs are settled.
- Plant Maintenance operates the overall maintenance business processes and functions allows a maintenance organization to: Identify, document, and correct failures and degradations of any assets for which they have responsibility.
SAP Plant Maintenance comprises the following activities:
Inspection
- All measures which establish the actual condition of a technical system.
Preventive maintenance
- All measures which maintain the ideal condition of a technical system. The purpose is to maintain the high availability of technical systems, for example, production plants, in the long term for the business.
Repair
- All measures which restore the ideal condition of a technical system. The purpose of maintenance processing comprises of several levels, which do not necessarily all have to be implemented in full. Therefore, it is possible to process a repair using many planning stages, such as preliminary costing, work scheduling, material provision, resource planning and permits. However, it is also possible to react immediately to damage events causing production shutdown, and to produce the required orders and shop papers with the minimum of entries in the shortest possible time.
Other measures taken using the maintenance organization
Integration with Other SAP modules
Through integration with other modules (for example, Materials Management, Production and Planning, Sales and Distribution, Personnel Management, and Controlling) the data is always kept current and processes that are necessary for Plant Maintenance and Customer Service are automatically triggered in other areas (for example, a purchase requisition for non-stock material in the Materials Management/Purchasing area).
