SAP Utility Week Webcast: Utilities Core Transformation Assets

[NicoleHuth]

Dear Utilities Community,

To survive in the new energy era, utilities need to adapt the maintenance strategies of their grids and power plants. The need for a higher degree of automation, increased transparency and optimized decision support has become even more evident in the COVID-19 crises. Fortunately many new technologies and solutions have become available in recent years to support utilities in this endeavor.

On May 12th, we presented in a 1,5 hour session how SAP customers and partners make use of these new technologies. The interest was huge, we had almost 2000 registrants for this session.

This was our agenda:

• SAP Solutions for Intelligent Asset Management 
  
  
  
  • SAP Solutions Optimizing the Asset Life-cycle
  
  
  • New Maintenance Strategies: From Reactive and Preventive to Predictive Maintenance
  
  
  • Meeting Challenges of the COVID-19 crisis
  
  
  
  


• EAM for Distribution System Operators: the Past, the Present and the Future
  
  
  
  • Digitalisation of EAM - Pursuing Efficient Automation and Data Integration
  
  
  • ISO 55000 Adoption - Achieving Standardization and Best Practices
  
  
  • Strategic Asset Management - Intelligence in Decisions and Reliability
  
  
  
  


• Predictive Maintenance for Transformers with our Partners Ellevio, EDP, INESCTEC, and Nuris
  
  
  
  • Results of the European Commission Research Project “InteGrid”
  
  
  • The Importance of Prediction for Maintenance Strategies and Investment Planning
  
  
  • Advanced Tools for oil and dry Type Transformers to Predict the real age of Transformers, the Possibility of Failure and the Maximum Permissible Load
  
  
  
  

May thanks to our speakers Gero Bieser, Miquel Carbo, Vasyl Tsykolanov, and Friedrich Georg Schwarzländer.

Further resources:

• SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service (PdMS) demo


• Solution Brief PdMS


• Strategy Whitepaper


• Compendium


• SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) website


• SAP EAM Community


• SAP Utilities Industry website ​


• SAP Utilities Community​


• Subscribe to the Utilities newsletter

Please watch the session on demand here.

When entering the platform, you can download the slide decks from the “Resource List”.



 

In the session, we announced  “The Intelligent Enterprise Innovation and Experience Proposition for the Energy Utilities Industry”. Please send a note to SAPUtilitiesNews@sap.com if you want to have a copy.

 

Many questions were asked and answered during the presentation via chat. We summarized the question and answers which could be of interest for you:

• Is there also SAP PM in the game? Or is this replaced by a certain SAP S/4HANA module?

SAP PM has become part of SAP S/4HANA, but it has been modernized, for example with new FIORI UIs and embedded analytics. You however still find the PM data model with functional locations, equipment, work orders, notifications and tasks lists in SAP S/4HANA.

• Is the 3D representation of the pump made available on the mobile device provided by 3D Visual Enterprise solution? If so is there any direct, standard integration between that solution and Ariba for example for the procurement of components?

Yes, it is done via the 3D Visual Enterprise solution. There is no standard out of the box SAP integration of interactive 2D/3D Spare Parts ordering within Ariba. The current roadmap however is to integrate interactive 2D/3D Spare Parts ordering via SAP 3D Visual Enterprise with SAP Commerce Cloud starting in Q4, 2020. There is already an integration between SAP Ariba and SAP Commerce Cloud.

• Do you see this operating alongside traditional SCADA systems?

Yes, SAP does not replace SCADA systems.

• Can you use the mobile SAP Asset Manager solution offline?

Yes, it can be used offline.

• Can these solutions be applied to medium voltage assets?

Yes, they can be applied to any voltage area.

• Has the SAP Asset Manager been deployed with the SAP Intelligent Asset Network (AIN)? If so for what use cases?

SAP Asset Manager can show data that have been shared via SAP AIN (3d images for example). Asset Manager can also show sensor data from SAP PdMS or support checklists from SAP ASPM.

• Is the inspection still one of your core processes after you applied SAP PdMS and why?

It is still a core process as predictive maintenance will only be applied to the most critical assets.

• May the field technician create any order onsite, if he would find any further issue or requirement that need to be fixed in the near future?

The field technician creates a notification with all the necessary information. This can then be turned into a work order.

• How is the integration of wearables and/or drones in order processing for field technicians?

Drones have been connected via the SAP Cloud Platform by some utilities. There are also PoCs for wearables, mostly also using the SAP CP.

• How do you assure data quality and integrity between the SAP files and the GIS files?

This is supported via the SAP Geo Enablement Framework GEF. You can in addition use the SAP Asset Information Workbench for master data governance.

• In terms of PdMS and the models it uses to predict a failure, the software has predetermined ML methods? Or you have to create them before in python/R and then consume them with PDMS? Or what´s the strategy to generate predictions? 

Both is supported, predefined Machine Learning methods are available but there is also the possibility to include R algorithms.

• How was the date for ageing rate of the transformer captured and estimation of life calculated?

The data (ambient temperature, current per phase) come in 10 min intervals from sensors. We use a representation in SAP HANA. "Consumed life" is the integral over the aging rate of the time span.

• For these forecasts to be reliable, what amount of historical data is necessary? How many years?

This cannot be answered in general. We normally run a two-day workshop with customers to analyse the available data and then determine if there is enough data available to achieve any business value. It depends for example on the frequency and consistency of the data, the failures that have been recorded etc.

• Is the predictive maintenance for transformer already available in SAP PdMS

Yes, but only in the on-premise version. We now plan to move it also to the cloud version.

 

SAP Environmental, Health, and Safety Management COVID-19 

• Does SAP offer any features in SAP Environment Health and Safety Management (EHS)  based on the regulation for working places in terms of COVID-19? 
  As outlined in the attached one-pager, we are leveraging our SAP EHS applications to build a COVID-19 response package. The mentioned applications will be implemented with some specific configuration in order properly meet the expectations of our customers in the context of the COVID-19 situation. We are collaborating with different implementation partners who  are offering such implementation packages.

• Can the features of Corona-App (in Germany) for tracking and treating the infected people be a part of new SAP EH&S?
  The Corona-App which you are pointing to is a public app which was developed together with Deutsche Telekom. In parallel we have developed a corporate version of such a tracing application which is tailored towards a corporate working environment. This application can we deployed in conjunction with the SAP EHS COVID-19 applications.

If you have further questions, please enter them into the chat/comments below.