Effec­tive asset man­age­ment keeps indus­tri­al com­pa­nies run­ning smooth­ly, ensur­ing asset reli­a­bil­i­ty and upkeep. By pri­or­i­tiz­ing asset health and main­te­nance, enter­pris­es avoid cost­ly pro­duc­tion dis­rup­tions and project delays. But asset man­age­ment is more than sim­ply ensure asset health; it also means includes ensur­ing safe­ty compliance. 

“Reg­u­la­tions, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, are tighter than ever and we see safe­ty as the foun­da­tion of oper­a­tions,” Ryan Jones, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er at SAP, said dur­ing a recent ASUG webcast. 

Jones’s team is focused on con­nect­ed asset man­age­ment process­es, specif­i­cal­ly closed-loop busi­ness process­es, con­sis­tent­ly learn­ing from data to make mean­ing­ful deci­sions. Along with AI capa­bil­i­ties to give end users more con­text for deci­sion-mak­ing, improved process­es have the poten­tial to increase oper­at­ing mar­gins, he said. 

Crit­i­cal to run­ning all of these intri­cate asset man­age­ment process­es is SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment. Jones spoke about the upcom­ing soft­ware improve­ments in an ASUG web­cast, ​“Updates in SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment,” cov­er­ing new SAP Fiori appli­ca­tions, embed­ded ana­lyt­ics, and AI enhance­ments that were released with the SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS03.

Here are some key insights from the event:

Incor­po­rat­ing SAP Fiori Applications 

Many SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment cus­tomers use appli­ca­tions, Jones said. But, many of these apps are not tru­ly SAP Fiori enabled — hav­ing gone through the spe­cif­ic process­es for cre­at­ing or mod­i­fy­ing the apps for Main­te­nance Order, Main­te­nance Noti­fi­ca­tion, and Tech­ni­cal Object operations. 

Jones said these are areas that SAP is strate­gi­cal­ly invest­ing in so cus­tomers can ben­e­fit from SAP Fiori fea­tures, such as embed­ded ana­lyt­ics on the appli­ca­tion, sim­pli­fied user sta­tus and vis­i­bil­i­ty, and view­ing sched­ules for Tech­ni­cal Objects. Sys­tem Object will inte­grate with SAP Asset Per­for­mance Man­age­ment to mod­el com­plex sys­tems, putting togeth­er unique inter­de­pen­den­cies for assets. 

Main­te­nance orders have his­tor­i­cal­ly used GUI screens for edit­ing, but the new Main­te­nance Order app with SAP Fiori allows for edit­ing on the oper­a­tional lev­el for mate­ri­als, along with advanced vis­i­bil­i­ty of order sta­tus and quick, visu­al­ly intu­itive analytics. 

Man­age Inspec­tion Check­lists have also been intro­duced, allow­ing tech­ni­cians to sub­mit inspec­tions in check­list form. The inspec­tion check­lists inte­grate the qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive capa­bil­i­ties of qual­i­ty man­age­ment with inspec­tion lots into main­te­nance process­es, so users can have this inte­grat­ed with their main­te­nance orders and oper­a­tions, Jones said. 

Opti­miz­ing Asset Per­for­mance Management

SAP is invest­ing heav­i­ly in improv­ing the inte­gra­tion of SAP S/4HANA with SAP Asset Per­for­mance Man­age­ment, Jones said, with the ulti­mate goal being opti­miz­ing the per­for­mance and reli­a­bil­i­ty of asset man­age­ment practices. 

Jones shared an exam­ple of super­vi­sors screen­ing main­te­nance requests. They can now use tai­lored rec­om­men­da­tions gen­er­at­ed in SAP Asset Per­for­mance Man­age­ment to select task lists and assign direct­ly with­in the main­te­nance request. 

One area that solves many griev­ances, Jones said, is the abil­i­ty to mass edit when it comes to asset man­age­ment. For things like select­ing sev­er­al main­te­nance orders and chang­ing the pri­or­i­ty, that can now be done on a macro lev­el, sav­ing users time and effort. 

Work Clear­ance Man­age­ment is hous­ing the doc­u­ments for con­trol­ling work exe­cu­tion, pro­vid­ing for­mal autho­riza­tion to per­form a job and con­sid­er­ing all its safe­ty con­di­tions. Many SAP cus­tomers require spe­cif­ic work per­mits, and being enabled by SAP Fiori appli­ca­tions allows for these per­mits to be cre­at­ed direct­ly in the main­te­nance order. This process bet­ter cen­tral­izes the nec­es­sary doc­u­men­ta­tion and work, lead­ing to more time saved. 

Since some jobs require a safe­ty cer­tifi­cate to be in place first, this appli­ca­tion is now using a phase-based main­te­nance approach to track over­all progress. Work­flows can allow for only com­pli­ant work to pro­ceed, or users can set up an approval process. These dig­i­tal con­trols and work­flows only speed up process­es when it comes to safe­ty and compliance. 

A new con­cept in SAP S/4HANA is plan­ning buck­ets, which allow users to group main­te­nance objects and items into man­age­able groups, such as time, dif­fer­ent attrib­ut­es of the main­te­nance group, and more. The sta­tus­es are very visu­al, so the user can quick­ly under­stand if a project has the com­po­nents and ser­vices that it needs. 

SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment for Resource Sched­ul­ing can also have a phase-based approach, and it can be inte­grat­ed with SAP HR and Suc­cess­Fac­tors, pro­vid­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty into work­ing times. Users can now also assign a per­son respon­si­ble for a job, as well as see the ser­vice order. 

Gen­er­a­tive AI and Agen­tic AI Capabilities 

Joule is embed­ded in SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment, both pri­vate and pub­lic cloud edi­tions, using a uni­fied asset data thread to unlock con­tin­u­ous opti­miza­tion such as sim­pli­fy­ing and automat­ing work­flows. Along with agen­tic AI, Jones said there are many ben­e­fits and capa­bil­i­ties com­ing to end users. 

Agen­tic AI is intend­ed to solve mul­ti­step prob­lems and plan ahead. In the con­text of SAP S/4HANA Asset Man­age­ment, its goal is to cre­ate main­te­nance plans.

For main­te­nance noti­fi­ca­tions, AI can look at dif­fer­ent attrib­ut­es and indi­ca­tors for object match and log­ic match to rec­om­mend main­te­nance orders. It pro­vides a score of how well the request match­es past orders, pro­vid­ing fast solu­tions to com­plex problems. 

The AI-imbued solu­tion promis­es to save mul­ti­ple steps of tedious process­es. If a user types in a prompt to Joule — SAP’s gen­er­a­tive AI copi­lot — ask­ing it to assign noti­fi­ca­tions and orders, the work­flow saves about 16 steps, Jones said. Rec­om­men­da­tions for upcom­ing main­te­nance plans save around 26 steps. For a super­vi­sor pro­cess­ing hun­dreds of main­te­nance orders at a time, tools like this sig­nif­i­cant­ly lessen the load. 

Using Busi­ness Data Cloud at the core of the AI capa­bil­i­ties, the sec­ond half of 2025 will fea­ture fur­ther enable­ment and effi­cien­cies on more applications.

For more, check out the full web­cast replay.