What's new in SAP Asset Performance Management 2404

[kate_dowle]

Welcome to our latest release blog for SAP Asset Performance Management 2404*. We're excited to share new improvements including improvements to ease rule creation, yet more convergence of strategy and maintenance execution with SAP S/4HANA integration, UI improvements and new analytics data sources for strategy objects. Let's dive in.

*for simplicity I may refer in the following blog to SAP Asset Performance Management as APM. The blog topics are structured by APM business capability.

Asset Health Monitoring

Highlight Outliers with Color Coding in App "View Technical Objects (Inspections)" 

In our quest to continually enhance user experience, we’re pleased to introduce color-coded thresholds and icons in the View Technical Objects (Inspections) application based on the underlying indicator configuration. This offers a more intuitive and user-friendly approach to inspecting your technical objects with easy-to-interpret visual color cues that correspond to the configured threshold settings. As such, users don’t just see the value and unit of the measure but can also understand at a glance how these figures stack up against the established indicators. For example, consider a technical object, such as a pressure vessel with a thickness level of 600mm. If this value is within the good range according to the indicator configuration, it will be shown in green. However, if the value dips below the threshold – say to 400mm, which is within the red range – the visual representation will change to red, alerting the user instantly about the need for attention. This new feature is applicable to all indicators with set thresholds.

Additionally, in the table header, instead of just displaying the characteristic or indicator, the position and the indicator category are also shown for user convenience. See the video:

Enhancing Rule Editor Flexibility: From Fixed to Dynamic Values in Notification Output Fields

In the existing rule editor, there's a feature allowing the creation of notifications in SAP S/4HANA as rule outputs. Until now, it was only possible to specify fixed values for the notification output fields Planning Plant, Task List Type, Task List Group, and Task List Group Counter during the design time of a rule.

Now you can dynamically insert values for these fields from class characteristics and attributes assigned to the affected Technical Objects​. This greatly enhances the overall flexibility of the system as it eliminates the need for fixed values for each rule setup. Consequently, if your rules involve multiple Technical Objects that use dissimilar task lists, you're no longer limited to a fixed task list value. Instead, the applicable task list can be dynamically derived based on the particular characteristics and attributes of each Technical Object. This breakthrough ultimately results in a more adaptable and efficient rule design process. You can have much more generic rules and create much less rules.

Asset Reliability Engineering

Converge strategy and execution - recommendation implementation by creating task list

​You can now implement reactive maintenance recommendations as task lists in S/4HANA Maintenance Management from the Implement Recommendations application and view them all in a comprehensive list view. 

Once you've reviewed the recommendations, you can initiate the implementation process by choosing the status 'Implementation in Process.' A 'Create' button has been incorporated for the easy creation of task lists. This newly created task list header, marked as 'Created' in SAP S/4HANA, will conveniently be linked to your chosen recommendation.

The task list in SAP S/4HANA can now be enriched with additional fields (such as Main Work Center, Usage, etc.) and operations as needed. When the task list in SAP S/4HANA is set to Released, you can manually change the recommendation status to Implemented, offering you complete control over the progress of your tasks.

This enables seamless integration between asset strategy and maintenance management, and reliability and maintenance planning. Above all, it provides a clear track of your maintenance work's reliability, keeping you updated on your recommendations' implementation status.

Select and assign technical objects to recommendations from strategy assessment for classes

​Technical objects define, in part, the 'operating context' of a strategy assessment for classes. The process of assigning these technical objects to recommendations is a crucial one, and used to be a time-consuming task, requiring navigating to each recommendation to assign the technical object.

We have therefore introduced a new feature allowing the selection and assignment of multiple technical objects in one go.

Now, instead of assigning technical objects to each recommendation individually, the process is significantly simplified. A user can select multiple recommendations within an ‘operating context’ and assign technical objects to them all at once.

Further enhancing usability, the user can filter the list of technical objects based on different criteria such as class, plan details, profile, and characteristic value. Selection can be made based on the relevancy of the recommendation.

A notable feature is that this bulk assignment of technical objects doesn't override existing assignments. If a recommendation already has some technical objects assigned, the new ones will be added to the list, not replace them.

Deliver APM Strategy Objects as Data Sources for SAC

We've provided three crucial views from the strategy assessment for classes as data sources within our analytics dashboard. This enhancement paves the way for analytics administrators and reliability engineers to:

1. Generate comprehensive analytics views that reveal strategy assessments for classes and recommendations to the SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud).
2. Synthesize insightful and meaningful analytics by leveraging these data sources in conjunction with existing data.

This improvement is expected not only to amplify the potential for critical insights but also to enhance customer experience by allowing for the creation of more significant and relevant analytics.

Until now, the dashboard included data sources from FMEA RCM master data, conditionality, and transaction data. Now we introduced data source objects for strategy assessments for classes. We achieved this through available views in the strategy assessment for classes that now include class assessment details like assessment name, class, catalog profile, planning plan detail, source, and assessment ID and status, among others.

We also added the class assessment and assigned failure data class assessment. This improvement integrates failure data codes assigned to any class assistant into a relational table, storing catalog type code, code group, and the order assigned to the assessment ID, in addition to the operating context.

Additionally, the enhancements provide assigned operating context details of an assessment, the context characteristics of each operating context, and corresponding operating context characteristic values.

For the users' convenience, strategy assessments can now be associated with all existing data sources. This feature enables users to conduct their analyses based on the class assessment name and operating context name, further simplifying the user experience.

In this sample dashboard you can observe a distribution of assessments based on their status represented in a pie chart. The chart depicts the percentage of created, released, and in process assessments. Additional drill-down features provide further details such as the assessment and class name associated with a particular assessment and catalog profile. The user is free to customise the columns to best suit their analytical needs.

These improvements not only enhance the analytics dashboard's capabilities but also provide users with a more robust, comprehensive, and user-friendly experience.

 

Keep in touch

Here's a quick reminder how to keep in touch with all things APM:

• Check out all forthcoming webcasts here. If you register for an IAM webcast, you will be automatically subscribed to our IAM Community Engagement Newsletter. Join us on May 22nd 4pm CET for the 2405 webcast!
• Watch the replay of our recent webcasts.
• Subscribe to What's New on the SAP Help Portal
• Submit or vote for the improvement you would like to see in the SAP Continuous Influence session

See you again soon for the 2405 release update!