Need for ATM like User-friendly menu for Plant Maintenance Users

[jogeswararao_kavala]

Background

A company did an innovative work which achieved a great deal of user-friendliness to the workers, in the area of daily work in SAP.  One day this company comes to know that exactly similar work was done by someone else in some other part of the globe, which was presented at the SAP Centric EAM 2013 and received lot many acclaims.  Such was the situation given rise to this post. (The author belongs to the company  mentioned above)

The idea for posting this was born after going through the blog Stories from SAP Centric EAM 2013 – “ A Simple Screen Modification Can Renovate a Crafts World “  by paul.kurchina.

See the following screens.

These are just two screen-parts (I could share here) from several such, we produced and using for user-friendliness in my company.

These include screens for

1. Worker Level (1st picture)
2. Senior Management Level (2nd picture)

These screens were designed to achieve,  the ATM  like user-friendliness to the users, with outputs on single mouse click.

My views here are:

• The presentation about such innovation during the event cited above must have certainly attracted several acclaims, because of the fact that the potential it has got to influence the user-friendliness of end-users (especially workers), which forms the foundation for any SAP-PM implementation to survive.

• These tools have got great significance in plant maintenance, where the worker often is not adequately computer literate. (He certainly needs an ATM sort of SAP screens).

• Even the senior maintenance management need such products. (It has been always difficult for this class too to deal with standard SAP screens).

• I am sure that, there are not 2 or 3 such cases of these innovations or few more. There will be many across the globe, because of the fact that SAP original screens very likely  force companies to discover such tools for their workers.

Purpose of this post is two fold.

1. Express my views on the topic in the referred post, which I think already did,
2. Some Facts and Suggestions  to SAP

Let’s look at the second part

• There is a need to recognize that users compare and expect the degree of user-friendliness of SAP screens with browser based systems they used earlier and even to ATMs as Paul rightly mentioned.

• The issue discussed above is more relevant to Plant Maintenance Environment and such basic needs are required to be addressed through standard programs.

• In the present  SAP modular architecture , the constraints  faced by the Functional modules, caused by the degree of dependency on Technical resources in situations like above should not be undermined.

• Such ATM like screens discussed so far will have benefits beyond the user-friendliness, such as drastic simplification of Training Time and Expenditure as rightly observed by Paul (We can list many other such benefits) 

The Suggestion Time:

It would be very useful to the Plant Maintenance community, if SAP identifies the areas for ATM like user-friendly screens and provide such products in Standard.

In addition OR alternatively,

SAP should provide a tool to Functional people in Screen Programming area (similar to Infoset Queries in Reporting area) which can develop the user-friendly Customized screens required by the users.

The author is a senior maintenance management in a large SAP customer company. He has 24 years shop-floor maintenance exposure and 6 years of ERP (SAP-PM) exposure .

The views expressed by him here are out of his above experience and believed to be more relevant to Plant Maintenance area. Hope it has got a constructive sound.

Thank you

Jogeswara Rao K