Embracing Change: Your Path to Transformation
Join us in this captivating blog series as we explore a real-life scenario where a customer strives to enhance maintenance planning by embracing the power of digital collaboration platforms like the SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration and automating some of the manual processes using the SAP Build Process Automation. However, there's a pressing challenge hindering their progress: their vendors and service providers face difficulties in adapting to newer systems. They persist in working with their internal processes due to limitations within their organization, resorting to the outdated practice of sharing equipment maintenance data via email in Excel files.
I would like to thank amar.jadhav for introducing the scenario to us, jayadnure for contributing to this project and co-authoring this blog post and gunteralbrecht for supporting to improve the project with his valuable feedback.
The Current Asset Maintenance Workflow: Uncovering Inefficiencies and Opportunities for Improvement
Discover how the asset-intensive industry thrives on efficient collaboration between customers, partners, vendors, and service providers. Let's delve into a practical scenario where ACME, a customer with multiple manufacturing plants, teams up with Velotics Engineering, their trusted service provider.
Figure-1 : As-Is Process
In the current asset maintenance process, several challenges hinder efficiency and data integrity. Let's explore these obstacles and discover how to overcome them for a streamlined workflow:
- Tedious Data Gathering: Dealing with data scattered in emails and Excel sheets adds unnecessary complexity and consumes valuable time. Streamlining this process is crucial to enhance productivity.
- Vigilance for Emails: Constantly monitoring emails for maintenance plans increases the risk of missing crucial information or deadlines. It's time to break free from this manual and error-prone approach.
- Data Entry Errors: Manually entering data from Excel sheets to the SAP S/4HANA system is prone to mistakes. Such errors can impact maintenance requests or orders, leading to inefficiencies and potential risks.
- Lack of Streamlined Workflow: The absence of a streamlined workflow hampers coordination and collaboration between ACME and Velotics Engineering. A seamless process is vital to ensure effective asset management and optimization.
- Data Integrity Challenges: Relying on Excel-based data storage poses risks to data integrity. With the possibility of accidental alterations or inconsistencies, it becomes essential to find a more robust and reliable solution.
By addressing these challenges head-on and implementing a digital collaboration platform, ACME can revolutionize its asset maintenance process. Unlocking the power of streamlined workflows and data integrity, ACME and Velotics Engineering can pave the way for enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and overall operational excellence.
Embracing a Future-Ready Asset Maintenance Transformation
Take a closer look at our proposed solution which includes a streamlined approval process, where ACME employees can validate maintenance plans before task execution. This process ensures that all maintenance tasks are executed as planned, reducing the risk of errors and delays. Some of the manual and repetitive tasks are automated, enabling significant time savings and ensuring consistent and reliable data exchange between OEMs and operators/vendors/service providers.
Figure-2: To-Be Process
Solution Demo
In this video, we provide a comprehensive overview of the asset maintenance process, showcasing each step from receiving the maintenance plan via email in an Excel file to obtaining approval from the workflow manager. You'll witness how our solution seamlessly integrates with the SAP S/4HANA system to create maintenance notifications and orders. These updates are then replicated in the SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration system, ensuring synchronisation and collaboration across platforms.
Summary
Bid farewell to countless hours wasted on manual data entry and document management. You'll witness a dramatic reduction in administrative tasks, freeing up your time for more strategic endeavours.Break down communication barriers and foster effective collaboration between customers and vendors.
Explore the power of collaboration with SAP BTP Document Management Service. Discover how we leveraged this service in our latest blog post.
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References
- SAP S/4HANA APIs:
- SAP Managed Tags:
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