ASUGNews.com, in conjunction with SAP’s Value Engineering Benchmarking program, will periodically highlight key SAP customer data on today’s hottest topics as well as reveal trends of interest to ASUG communities. 

The topic of “preventative maintenance” has broad appeal for consumers today—with our health care and our automobiles, to name two. But it’s also a key area for enterprise asset management (EAM), and it can offer benefits in terms of higher equipment effectiveness and lower service expenses.

The data for these contentions comes from the EAM survey that launched in 2009 and today has more than 150 participants from a wide range of industries (primary representations from oil & gas and utilities) and multiple revenue categories (less than $1 billion in revenues is most represented). The study covers five processes, including: asset visibility and performance, maintenance execution, and reporting and analytics.

The SAP EAM benchmarking data illustrates the gaps in how much importance EAM customers assign to both improving asset reliability and reducing operational costs and how they have been unable to achieve those two goals.

The chart below presents EAM data showing that businesses that adopt a preventive maintenance strategy can help address these issues. The left chart shows that those surveyed organizations, where a majority of work orders go through preventive maintenance inspections, have, on average, 9 percent higher operating equipment effectiveness. The right chart explains how surveyed organizations, which have a preventive maintenance approach, have experienced, on average, 31 percent lower service and maintenance expenses.

To read how Marin Water adopted a preventative maintenance strategy that allowed them to lower operational costs and extend asset lifecycle by 5 percent, see this SAP case study.

To get started in the Enterprise Asset Management benchmarking program, ASUG members should visit the EAM page on ASUG.com. SAP’s Performance Benchmarking program is a strategic service sponsored by its Value Engineering organization. Originally launched in 2004 together with ASUG as a forum to exchange metrics and best practices, the program today has grown into a global effort and one of the largest such programs in the industry—with more than 12,000 participants from more than 4,000 companies and studies available in 12 languages. Participants receive—free of charge—customized and confidential benchmarking comparisons against industry peers as well as aggregate analyses. To participate in the SAP benchmarking program, go to the Value Management homepage.