It's been an exciting few months rolling out the SAP BusinessObjects Asset Analytics rapid-deployment solution (RDS). It’s now available to customers! Not only was it a great opportunity to work with a team of very talented colleagues on this project but it was also satisfying to have taken part in creating a solution that helps to close a gap in SAP’s holistic EAM offering. Asset analytics is something EAM customers have asked for, for a long time. Since its release early this year, the customer pipeline has gradually grown to a healthy level, with prospects in EMEA, North America, and Latin America. A portion of the original build team has remained to focus on localizing the solution for our customers in those regions.
The RDS was designed by the EAM line of business and packaged by the Solution Assembly and Packaging (SAaP) group to provide maintenance organizations across industries an easy way to leverage their existing maintenance data and IT investments to optimize Enterprise Asset Management strategy. Preconfigured content in the form of BI extractors, standard ad hoc reports, analytical tools, KPI scorecards and dashboards help customers identify best performers and laggards in their EAM operations so that successes can be replicated across the organization as best practices as well as root causes to problems to help drive continuous improvements. When our customers sign on to this solution, they can be assured to get a baseline EAM analytics solution which includes preconfigured software, predefined services, packaged content (up to 31 of the most sought after EAM KPIs) and user enablement at a predictable price and timeline that make solution adoption fast and easy.
Why Asset Analytics?
There is a large EAM customer community out there that are using SAP Plant Maintenance today to support their maintenance operations such as work order management, planning, and scheduling. Over time, these installations have accumulated a wealth of transactional data that have not been leveraged for its potential. It’s almost like having an oil well underneath your house all this time and what you need is an easy way to get it out of the ground and apply it in ways that is only limited by imagination. Reality is that many of our customers still use basic reports that come with Plant Maintenance or have even resorted to downloading data to Excel to do basic analysis. While it was enough to support day-to-day activities, these temporary solutions fell way short in providing stakeholders with intelligence that draws attention to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, bottlenecks, and unmitigated risks in their maintenance operations. With the kind of advanced analytics that SAP BusinessObject Asset Analytics provide, EAM organizations can tackle root-cause to problems instead of being stuck in a firefighting mode (Reactive Maintenance).That free up supervisors and planners to focus more attention on strategic activities that will steer the organization toward proactive methodologies such as condition-based maintenance and/or predictive maintenance. At this more advanced stage, EAM organizations will reap the benefits of stable asset performance (reliable assets) which ultimately differentiate them from their competitors and increase their ability to achieve high production attainment rate and produce high quality products for their customers.
We listen to our customers and their message is clear — provide a solution that leverages existing infrastructure to provide asset analytics in a fast, easy, and predictable way. There are still many opportunities for improvement, and we’re constantly working with our customers and partners to provide the best solutions.
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