Insights from the SAP-Centric EAM 2013 Event - Huntington Beach March 2013 (Part 7 of 12) : This is part of a twelve part blog series brought to you by Norm Poynter and Paul Kurchina, designed to inspire and educate by sharing experiences with the SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Community. For the past nine years, the Eventful Group's SAP-Centric EAM North American Event ( Supported by SAP and ASUG ) has brought together the EAM community to network, share ideas and experiences, and explore solutions for Enterprise Asset Management.
In the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, more than one fortune seeker most likely uttered, “There’s nothing like a good nugget.”
That’s also true regarding Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). There’s nothing like a good nugget of EAM information. And that’s what Dean Fitt’s presentation at the SAP-Centric EAM event was full of—valuable and practical information attendees could use about SAP ERP 6.0 and its enhancement packages, which add more functionality.
“Enhancement packages and business functions enable you to considerably simplify the process of introducing and using new SAP developments for Enterprise Asset Management,” said Fitt. “You can selectively introduce individual new developments to optimize selected business processes.”
Fitt, an SAP Solution Manager specializing in EAM in the Industry Business Solutions group, took the audience through an overview of SAP’s Enhancement Packages, from EHP0 to EHP6. These packages contain functional enhancements, industry-specific enhancements, and simplifications.
He also covered enterprise service (ES) bundles, which are delivered with SAP enhancement packages. Each ES bundle comprises a set of enterprise services to support an end-to-end business process (for example, Order to Cash) across the SAP Business Suite.
Fitt noted that from a functional perspective, SAP enhancement packages are built on top of each other: By installing the latest SAP enhancement package, you get the contents of all the earlier packages. Fitt took the audience through activation and configuration steps.
If all of this instruction and information weren’t enough, Fitt then reached for the gold—nuggets regarding three types of functionality the EAM community needs to know about: Maintenance Event Builder, Shift Notes/Reports, and Inspection Rounds.
Maintenance Event Builder (MEB) provides an intuitive, easy-to-use way to manage the planning of maintenance events (such as turnarounds) that represent individual work packages. MEB lets users review maintenance notifications, generate plant maintenance or customer service orders from the task lists in the notifications, and assign the work. MEB also provides a view of outstanding work requirements, due dates, and work orders.
MEB supports planners by creating work packages that include outstanding maintenance requirements for upcoming maintenance events. Once you have set up the work package, you can generate work orders for the technicians.
Fitt then moved on to talk about how a poor shift handover could result in disaster. He then referenced a well-known process safety management event where a column at an oil and gas refinery was filled on one shift and mistakenly filled again on the next shift, leading to a loss of containment and a subsequent explosion. The investigation of this event outlined several root causes, one of which was poor shift information and custodial handover.
This is why shift notes and reports are so important. Introduced in SAP EHP3/5, Shift Notes and Shift Reports offers a comprehensive solution that succinctly communicates changes and events from one shift to another. Shift Reports allows you to record all unplanned activities and events. Its easy-to-use interface can be made available to all members of operations and the maintenance team. The shift report feature records important events and occurrences within a defined period of time, summarized in a PDF document.
Along those same lines of the importance of communication, Fitt presented another nugget, Inspection Rounds(EHP4/5), which supports the definition, planning and scheduling, execution, and confirmation of inspections.
Another key feature covered was Customer Connection, a collaboration platform between customer communities and SAP to agree on focus topics and collect and implement improvement requests. Customer Connection is an example of SAP listening to its customers and making improvements, big and small. To see what’s already been implemented, Improvement Finder lets you easily locate SAP’s delivered improvements.
Dean’s presentation contained lots of gold on how to better use SAP systems, make suggestions, and follow those suggestions through. For more information on the features presented, check out the links provided.
To learn more, watch the video and view the powerpoint of Dean Fitt's presentation.
For more information, here's a post with all of the links to the published blogs in this series.