Everything evolves, and maintenance is no exception- continuously evolving into a more streamlined and efficient process!
With evolving technology, the maintenance practices have improved as well. With the advent of Industry 4.0 and availability of IoT there are new avenues for maintenance as well, which are cost effective and increases the reliability of machines. Data science, AI and ML can be used to predict and avoid failures based on historical data.
Maintenance always has budget constraints and I’m yet to see an industry where maintenance has unlimited resources to spend and keep the plant running without issues. Improved maintenance processes can save a lot of money and resources, while also increasing the reliability and predictability of the machines.
Historical Maintenance Process:
Historically, the only maintenance that we used to do was Reactive maintenance, which means you maintain something only when it breaks. This could be either corrective or breakdown in nature. The problem with this kind of maintenance is it is very costly and can cause long breakdowns where a line, a section or the whole plan is inoperative.
The reason Reactive maintenance is expensive has 3 major factors:
- Possible loss of production.
- Unplanned human resource requirements.
- Unplanned spare part requirements.
Current Maintenance Processes:
Apart from the historical Reactive maintenance, the maintenance practices slowly evolved into Proactive maintenance, which means doing repetitive maintenance tasks for instance changing certain spare parts of a machine such as gaskets, o-rings or changing the lubricating oil on a regular basis. The schedule or interval could be suggested by the OEMs or could be based on the experience of the operator. This was effective and helped avoid breakdowns. However, this was still expensive as the parts were being changed even when the parts are in good condition. This also might have environmental impact due to wastage of parts and oil. Proactive maintenance is still the most prevalent maintenance strategy in most industries.
The reason Proactive maintenance is expensive has 2 major factors:
- Excessive spare part consumption.
- Increased human resource requirements.
Benefits of Proactive maintenance:
- Increased reliability.
- Reduced unplanned shutdowns.
Future Maintenance Processes using SAP APM:
- The next evolution in maintenance is Predictive and Prescriptive maintenance.
Predictive maintenance is a way to predict the future failures so that timely actions could be taken to plan and handle the failure. Prescriptive maintenance though on top of predicting the failure, also prescribes actions that can be taken to avoid that future failure.
For example, if the RPM of a purifier is lower than normal, then using SAP APM’s Asset Health module an Alert or a Notification could be generated to inspect the purifier.
- Another evolution in maintenance is RCM- Reliability Centered Maintenance.
RCM dictates identifying critical assets/ machines, defining failure modes based on the operating context and creating a strategy for the maintenance of identified machines.
For example, we identify a fuel oil purifier as a critical piece of equipment since it supplies fuel oil to the main engine. We define operating context as heavy oil as the medium the purifier is processing. Then we define the maintenance strategies on it based on the experience and history of purifiers with the same operating context (fuel oil). Maintenance strategies can be defined in the form of reactive, proactive or improvement recommendations. The recommendations could be converted into time or counter based (for ex. run hours) maintenance plans and task lists. These strategies could be revisited based on the feedback and thus can be improved continuously.
This could also aid in predictive maintenance. For instance, while working on the notification created in the example under predictive/ prescriptive maintenance and converting it into a Work Order a task list could be included based on the Recommendations from SAP APM’s Asset Reliability Engineering module.
Benefits of Predictive maintenance:
- Increased reliability.
- Reduced maintenance cost.
- Consistently improving maintenance program.
So, to answer the original question which a lot of prospective customers’ would be asking, “why do we need SAP Asset Performance Management (APM)” - SAP APM with it’s Asset Health and Asset Reliability Engineering modules can help industries transition from the traditional reactive & proactive maintenance to predictive, prescriptive maintenance and RCM. This will help in overall improvement of maintenance processes, increase in reliability and reduction in maintenance costs.
You can also read my other blogs:
What is SAP Asset Performance Management?
SAP APM in Maritime Industry
