More than 900 atten­dees rep­re­sent­ing about 600 com­pa­nies and 54 coun­tries gath­ered for the 16^th annu­al SAP-Cen­tric EAM vir­tu­al con­fer­ence. Unlike past years, atten­dees weren’t able to con­gre­gate in con­fer­ence rooms for this event, which focused on inno­va­tions in enter­prise asset man­age­ment and cus­tomer suc­cess sto­ries. The con­fer­ence took place com­plete­ly online, dur­ing which reg­is­trants tuned in to all keynotes, fire­side chats, and cus­tomer sto­ries remote­ly. Through a series of ses­sions span­ning two days, the con­fer­ence armed atten­dees with vital insights and guid­ance to con­front these uncer­tain times.

“I was thrilled that so many cus­tomers and part­ners in the EAM field took the time to share their lessons, lis­ten to the pre­sen­ters, and engage with their ASUG net­work dur­ing the two-day event,” said Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO. ​“Hear­ing from oth­er cus­tomers and experts is what makes all the dif­fer­ence for SAP cus­tomers who are try­ing to get more val­ue from their exist­ing invest­ments and deter­mine an inno­v­a­tive path for the future.”

Expect — And Pre­pare For — the Unexpected

The event kicked off with a pre­sen­ta­tion from Kathy Pear­son, strate­gic agili­ty sub­ject mat­ter expert and senior fel­low at the Leonard Davis Insti­tute of Health Eco­nom­ics, Whar­ton School, Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. She walked atten­dees through key ways man­agers can nav­i­gate the chop­py waters that an event like COVID-19 cre­ates. Accord­ing to Pear­son, the best way to con­front a cri­sis is to pre­pare for anything. 

“Strong lead­ers are the ones who say they don’t know what’s going to hap­pen in the future, but they are pre­pared for the unknown,” she said. 

Mobile Plant Main­te­nance at Maple Leaf Foods

Through­out the vir­tu­al SAP-Cen­tric EAM con­fer­ence, atten­dees also heard from SAP cus­tomers who have suc­cess­ful­ly adopt­ed the soft­ware company’s prod­ucts and are using them to man­age their assets and gen­er­ate sav­ings. Faye Coop­er, direc­tor of asset reli­a­bil­i­ty at Maple Leaf Foods, dis­cussed how the com­pa­ny worked with SAP to devel­op an app to assist with its plant maintenance. 

Maple Leaf, Canada’s largest pro­tein com­pa­ny, want­ed to close the stake­hold­er gap between plant work­ers and employ­ees mon­i­tor­ing plant per­for­mance. The com­pa­ny engaged with employ­ees in its plants to help devel­op a mobile solu­tion that was easy to learn and use on the floor. Maple Leaf worked with Apple and SAP to devel­op the appli­ca­tion, while SAP assist­ed with the back-end devel­op­ment of the app and how to roll it out to employees. 

The project is about halfway com­plete, with the app in the hands of 450 main­te­nance techs and super­vi­sors across 17 plants in the U.S. and Cana­da. Maple Leaf is plan­ning next to roll the app out to all of its 22 plants. 

The Impor­tance of Data Migration 

Anoth­er cus­tomer sto­ry cov­ered at the con­fer­ence was Xcel Ener­gy, which just went through a mas­sive data migra­tion to SAP from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent sys­tems it was pre­vi­ous­ly using. Using the suite tools SAP offers for enter­prise infor­ma­tion man­age­ment (EIM), Xcel Ener­gy con­vert­ed more than 300 mil­lion data records. 

Jeff McDon­ald, data gov­er­nance con­sul­tant at Xcel Ener­gy, walked atten­dees through this process, which began in 2012 and con­tin­ues in 2020. He also talked about how some of the com­pa­nies can avoid hur­dles in their own migrations.

“We were so con­cerned with build­ing out a process and get­ting peo­ple to under­stand how data fit with their process­es that we did a dis­ser­vice to our­selves by not hav­ing a sol­id data strat­e­gy upfront,” McDon­ald said. ​“Going for­ward, I would rec­om­mend adopt­ing a strat­e­gy before work­ing on the oth­er pieces of data migration.” 

McDon­ald high­light­ed the impor­tance of estab­lish­ing an exec­u­tive sup­port struc­ture and data gov­er­nance roles in an orga­ni­za­tion, cre­at­ing stan­dard data gov­er­nance doc­u­ments, and devel­op­ing con­crete met­rics and KPIs. Above all, he encour­aged atten­dees to think about why they were going through this process before beginning. 

“It’s real­ly impor­tant to under­stand why peo­ple are doing data gov­er­nance in their orga­ni­za­tions,” McDon­ald said. ​“For us, it was all about ensur­ing our data was for­mal­ly man­aged and can be trust­ed for busi­ness decisions.” 

Inno­va­tions in the SAP EAM Portfolio

The con­fer­ence also fea­tured SAP prod­uct experts, who walked atten­dees through some new devel­op­ments with­in the SAP EAM port­fo­lio. These inno­va­tions make use of tech­nolo­gies like machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to give users a clear­er pic­ture of how their assets are performing. 

Rachel Romanos­ki, SAP solu­tions man­ag­er of dig­i­tal assets at SAP, explained to atten­dees how SAP S/4HANA can help users main­tain assets in a more pre­cise man­ner. For exam­ple, the plat­form can cap­ture labor, cost, and mate­ri­als nec­es­sary for asset main­te­nance. SAP Asset Man­ag­er shows users labor time, inven­to­ry on hand, and real-time infor­ma­tion on cur­rent oper­at­ing con­di­tions, all in an eas­i­ly acces­si­ble mobile for­mat. New ana­lyt­ics are now embed­ded in SAP S/4HANA that give spe­cif­ic reports on an asset’s per­for­mance and allow users to drill down into the infor­ma­tion being cap­tured in the ERP system. 

After a full year of restrict­ed sup­ply chains and mas­sive shifts in the enter­prise asset man­age­ment space, ASUG is host­ing a con­fer­ence series ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for EAM from April 12 to 14. Reg­is­ter for the vir­tu­al con­fer­ence to hear experts and thought-lead­ers give pre­sen­ta­tions on pre­dic­tive main­te­nance, IoT and inte­gra­tion, mobil­i­ty, and data-dri­ven insights.