PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE: CLEVER AND AUTOMATED WITH SAP!

The maintenance of industrial plants is one of the key factors for the competitiveness of modern companies. Today it is in fact possible to intervene before a malfunction, avoiding production downtime and huge economic damages, thanks to innovation and digital technologies.

SAP, the most advanced management system on the market, allows companies to cleverly manage plant maintenance, thanks to the PM module, which is a specific module with many strategic functions. 

Maintaining and managing machinery and facilities in an industrial environment is essential both in the prevention of failures and in the replacement of a component before it reaches the end of its life cycle. The goal is to prevent production downtime and ensure a safe working environment.

Two types of maintenance can be managed through the PM (Plant Maintenance) module in SAP:

  1. Predictive maintenance

The Plant Maintenance module is mainly designed to prevent failures, through the analysis of the technical data sheets of the machinery. From this analysis emerge what are the critical components that must necessarily be replaced before the failure occurs and therefore the stop. Thanks to the data stored in SAP, through intelligent automation and/or manual loading of data by users, the system delivers specific maintenance alerts. In general, there are distinctions between preventive and predictive maintenance, i.e. preventive maintenance is regularly scheduled based on the life cycle of machine components, while predictive maintenance is scheduled based on asset conditions and both are summarised in scheduled maintenance. That is why, in the SAP environment, discussing preventive or predictive maintenance means referring to targeted maintenance programs, which contain alerts with intervention suggestions. In other words, SAP is instructed on all the characteristics of a specific machine, to which a maintenance plan with specific alerts is then attributed. In this way, it is also possible to purchase any spare parts in advance, without having to wait for the day on which replacement is scheduled.

  1. Corrective maintenance 

In this case, action is taken after the failure of the machinery. However, SAP allows you to intelligently exploit any criticality, because it is possible to trace the failure within the management system, creating catalogues with all the information about the failure itself and the way it was resolved.

Here are the advantages of the SAP module:

  • In case of predictive maintenance, the risk of machinery breakdown is avoided. The lifetime of the machine is actually extended thanks to correct maintenance; 
  • It is possible to track maintenance costs with certainty and therefore reduce them if any criticality emerges; 
  • More flexibility in the stipulation of maintenance contracts with external companies thanks to certain data regarding scheduled interventions;
  • Automated alerts designed to prevent production downtime and more quality and efficiency in production.

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