Maintenance Technician Standard Persona in SAP Service and Asset Manager

[kunal_mehta]

In the dynamic and complex landscape of asset management, efficiency and simplicity are paramount. To address the evolving needs of businesses in this realm, SAP Service and Asset Manager introduces a new persona: Maintenance Technician Standard. This persona is tailored to empower maintenance technicians with a unique interface that simplifies their task of reporting and managing maintenance requests through a simplified UX and process workflow. 

Who is it for?

The new standard persona is geared towards users that just want to have a simple app to create maintenance requests and manage work through notifications. For such cases, the Maintenance Technician Professional persona (also called "Pro") includes many features that may not always be used or necessary. The new Standard version provides a focused feature set centered on notifications, ensuring a more streamlined user experience. 

Process Flow

Although the standard persona is targeted for technicians, it can be assigned to any user who needs to create notifications to report incidents, observations, defects etc.

The picture below shows high level processes supported for Maintenance Technician Standard persona. 

 

As seen above, there are 3 main uses cases supported for Standard persona:

1. Maintenance Request – to notify of an issue or problem identified.
2. Malfunction Report – to request maintenance repair to be performed for a malfunction or damage to an asset.
3. Activity Report – to document activities performed. This could be used to document minor work for which a maintenance order is not required or to report inspection findings.

How is it different from the current Maintenance Technician Professional persona?

There are several differences between the Standard and the Pro persona, from feature set to user experience and licensing. Let us look at each one of these.

Feature differences

As mentioned before, the “standard” persona is centered around notifications and processing of notifications while the Professional persona is a more comprehensive maintenance execution support including work/maintenance orders and notifications. Standard persona is for lightweight maintenance while Professional persona is for full-fledged maintenance support.

Here are the key features supported:

1. Create and edit/update and complete notifications with key information such as technical object info, damage codes, failure modes, pictures (with annotations), notes, geo-coordinates where issue occurred and breakdown information etc. 
2. Download and view existing notifications.
3. Simple job execution using via notification tasks and activities.
4. Time / effort recording using timesheets. 

1. Assess priority matrix.
2. Equipment and functional locations with support for taking measurement readings.
3. Online search for equipment and functional locations, allowing notification creation from searched assets.
4. Phase model notification support including minor work.

Following key features from Maintenance Technician Professional persona are not included in the Standard persona:

1. Work order management – Create, update, and display and history of work orders.
2. Maps - Esri GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and GEF (Geographical Enablement Framework)
3. Supervisor mode
4. QM (Quality Management) inspections
5. EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) Checklists
6. Crew management
7. Meter management
8. Material (parts) management
9. Linear asset managemen

You can find the complete list of support and unsupported features from the Asset Manager help portal.

Licensing implications

Due to the reduced feature set, Maintenance Technician Standard persona is considered Standard use of the SAP Service and Asset Manager and SAP Mobile Execution and Dynamic Forms licenses. will cost half of Pro persona, as noted in the table below:

Persona	Full Usage Equivalent (FUE)	Mobile Users
Maintenance Technician Standard	1	2
Maintenance Technician Professional	1	1

Implementation Considerations

Maintenance Technician Standard will be pre-configured with the above feature set with 2405 release. One can assign this persona to a user the same way as the Maintenance Technician Professional persona, from the System Administration and Monitoring portal available with SAP Service and Asset Manager on S/4HANA or ECC systems. Following are the main steps:

1. Authorization object: Users with Maintenance Technician Standard persona must be assigned authorization object ‘/MERP/MTB’ in SAP backend system.
2. Assign the persona in User Management section of Admin portal: See screenshot below for steps.
   
   
   
3. Enabling and Configuring features for Maintenance Technician Standard persona: The features described above for Maintenance Technician Standard persona can be enabled in the config panel, following the steps outlined in the standard documentation.

In Conclusion

The Maintenance Technician Standard persona brings easy to use UI and just enough information for a user to create maintenance requests when an issue is detected, perform lightweight work, and record their time using mobile device wherever they go, whether online or offline.  

The SAP Service and Asset Manager 2405 app is now available to download from the iOS App Store or Google Play store with built in pre-loaded demo data, allowing you to check out the new Field Service Technician persona as well as new innovations for Maintenance Technician and Inventory Clerk personas.    

Please check out the product roadmap for future innovations in this space. You can provide input and influence the future functionality via Customer Confluence by voting on the existing features or putting in a request for new features. 

Finally, feel free to provide feedback, comments or suggestions that will help us make the product even better.