Two weeks ago in Austin / TX we experienced the 10th anniversary of the SAP-Centric EAM North American conference. A lot of knowledge and best practice was shared between the more than 520 attendees from asset intensive businesses across many industries. While some topics have remained equally important over the years, like user experience, asset master data, planning & scheduling, new technology drivers are now providing huge opportunities for new strategies and business models.
When selecting the right maintenance strategies, it gets more and more important to holistically address cost, risk, and performance, but also more tightly integrate IT and OT. IP-based communication, also called the internet of things, makes it easier than ever to include data from assets into the decision-making or maintenance execution processes. Navigating through vast amounts of data then leads to the need to store and analyze this data efficiently using in-memory and predictive technology (like SAP HANA), but to visualize the results in the context of the asset, asset system, or plant (SAP 3D Visual Enterprise and SAP Lumira). Information then has to be made available onsite in the format the users need (SAP Mobile Platform and Mobile Asset Management).
This being said, the challenge is twofold: First, raising the quality of information in the existing business IT systems while lowering that cost of
operation. Second, connecting OT (like SCADA, process control systems, etc.) with the business IT using M2M connectivity. In this regard, cloud will play a
major in sharing both asset master and condition as well as executing the maintenance or service related processes.
During SAP-Centric EAM we have seen stunning customer presentations on operational excellence achieved today and visions for the future like SaskPower presenting their licensing certification process and PG&E elaborating on integrating Linear Asset Management with GIS.
Attendees could get also a good overview about the partner ecosystem, with Meridium presenting the enhanced Endorsed Business Solution on
Reliability-Based Asset Management for SAP solutions or Utopia presenting their new developments on asset master data for
SAP Master Data Governance.
The journey to a comprehensive and mature asset management according to the new ISO 55000 series has just begun. Let's the latest technology drivers support the business for achieving operational excellence.
Check out SAP's portfolio for Asset Management using the brand-new Solution Explorer, an easy-to-use tool on our public website allowing for getting more information on our solutions for Industries, LoB, and Technology.
Looking forward to seeing you at SAP-Centric EAM 2015 March 8-11, 2015, in Huntington Beach / California.