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Running plant maintenance efficiently and well-planned is crucial to avoid disruptions to your business processes.
- Have you wondered how you can avoid corrective maintenance and instead use preventive maintenance to prevent business disruptions?
- Would you like to understand better why maintenance activities are completed late?
- Do you need more process transparency when it comes to the integration of acquire-to-decommission processes with management accounting processes?
The value accelerator for analysis of acquire-to-decommission (plug and gain approach) can help you answer these questions by providing out-of-the-box data and analyses that do not require additional project effort.
What’s included?
The following dashboards are targeted at continuously improving your acquire-to-decommission process:
- Optimize your maintenance order processing
- Improve financial performance
- Optimize your status change usage
If you want to change your acquire-to-decommission process as part of a SAP S/4HANA transformation, the following dashboards might interest you. Please consider that they might also prove useful as part of continuous business process improvement initiatives.
- Analyze and improve your Best-Run Score
- Harmonize your process
The data, as customary with the plug-and-gain approach, is sourced from SAP Signavio Process Insights. This allows to quickly provide data without building or leveraging dedicated extractors in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. It is a combination of different process flows and the performance indicator for status changes to plant maintenance orders. Based on this, a holistic view of the acquire-to-decommission process can be provided.
The dashboards are structured to seamlessly lead users through the analyses, providing explanations of context and motivation, along with potential conclusions for each analysis. Additionally, users will receive recommendations on how to proceed and address the root causes of process issues. This facilitates business users in navigating the analysis without requiring extensive technical knowledge of SAP ERP or expertise in process mining.
As part of this blog, we will focus on a couple of sample use cases showcasing how the content can be used to improve your acquire-to-decommission process.
Example: Avoid corrective maintenance
Start out by analyzing your share of preventive and corrective maintenance. A high share of corrective maintenance, which typically occurs ad hoc and unplanned, indicates that you might need to invest more in preventive maintenance, which helps you avoid situations in which you must react at short notice to avoid business disruptions.
Subsequently, you might want to understand to which extent maintenance, be it preventive or corrective, is performed on time. If plant maintenance orders tend to be completed late, the plug and gain analysis for acquire-to-decommission can help you to understand root causes, such as overloaded work centers or specific equipment that are particularly prone to corrective maintenance.
This information can help you define counteractive measures such as distributing the workload between the different work centers, introducing a regular maintenance plan, or even exchanging equipment frequently requiring corrective maintenance.
The root cause analysis also considers master data and configuration issues, such as missing priority set. This impacts the planned start and end dates of maintenance orders and, therefore, the prioritization of maintenance orders.
Example: Analyze and improve your status usage
The status of a plant maintenance order controls which business activities can be performed on the plant maintenance order. That’s why it’s important to make sure the status is set as intended and to avoid setting and resetting the same status repeatedly. The sequence of status changes is partially controlled by SAP standards but heavily depends on your business context, especially when it comes to user status.
You can analyze typical patterns of status changes by using the variant analysis provided as part of the Value accelerator for acquire-to-decommission (plug and gain approach). By comparing this to your to-be process, you understand whether there is a need to work on as-is processes.
Moreover, the analysis provides you with information on to what extent status are revoked. This can be a sign of misalignment that might cause delays in the process.
Example: Optimize your financial performance
The acquire-to-decommission process has an impact not only on your production processes but also on your financial performance. If, for example, plant maintenance orders frequently take more effort and material than initially planned, you have to face cost overruns. Using the plug and gain analyses for acquire-to-decommission, you can identify plants and work centers for whose actual costs frequently exceed planned cost. As a prerequisite for such an analysis, planned costs need to be available on the plant maintenance order, which is also analyzed as part of the Optimize your financial performance dashboard.
Analyzing commitments along the lifecycle of plant maintenance orders, especially on plant maintenance orders with cost overrun, adds to the financial performance analysis provided. Settlement is an important process step for the acquire-to-decommission process since it represents the point in time when the plant maintenance order is debited and the costs are assigned to, for example, a cost center or are capitalized in the case of asset manufacturing. Understanding whether maintenance orders have been settled and whether they are settled frequently supports you in understanding whether you have to optimize your settlement process by, for example, making sure that technically completed plant maintenance orders are settled.
How to get it?
If you believe that the above above-mentioned analyses would offer value to you and your organization, you might be wondering how to obtain them. These analyses are included in the plug-and-gain approach by SAP Signavio, which has been launched at Sapphire. This approach harnesses the capabilities of the SAP Signavio Suite and offers distinctive out-of-the-box analyses for both continuous improvement and transformation projects. By leveraging this approach, you can accelerate lengthy implementation projects and quickly access valuable insights. Reach out to your SAP counterpart to learn more about how you could benefit from plug and gain by SAP Signavio!
Where to find further information
- The following note explains the prerequisite and scope of plug and gain by SAP Signavio: https://me.sap.com/notes/3340986/E
- Previous blogs on Best-Run scores, process house, transaction scores and process flow variants, invoice-to-pay and invoice-to-cash
- Plug and gain approach: https://www.signavio.com/plug-and-gain-approach/
