Seamlessly Integrate your SAP Transactions with the Plant Maintenance Cockpit

Efficient and effective Plant Maintenance can be a challenge for organizations of all sizes. In Plant Maintenance, there are multiple positions, with dependencies between the actions taken by individual members, as well as coordinated work between teams. In a plant, you may have plant and maintenance engineers in the same work area as data analysts, project managers, supervisors and more. This can lead to confusion, as multiple professions are trying to accomplish their tasks simultaneously.

In these cases, it’s important to utilize an enterprise level solution, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This provides a single source of data, keeps personnel and equipment performing at their optimal capacities, and records useful documentation for ongoing business operations. If you’re already using an ERP Solution, it is even more important to have it configured in a way that provides value, improves workplace efficiency, and cuts down on third party application interference (for example, heavy use of Microsoft Excel).

The core level of SAP ERP, known as SAP Business Suite, contains a host of applications which can help optimize your workflow and reporting within all the daily tasks of Plant Maintenance. Like other ERP systems, it was designed with a general use case in mind, and for this reason, may not be a good fit for your business right out of the box.

Each program in the core Plant Maintenance contains a multitude of non-essential fields, many of which can lead to input errors by inexperienced workers. Your team will need to be educated on how to perform the necessary transactions, remember the technical names of these programs (known as “transaction codes” in SAP vernacular), and even re-produce the order of operations.

If you’re familiar with the standard workflow in SAP, your team’s tasks will be something like the following:

• Create a notification in transaction “A”
• Create an emergency order in transaction “B”
• Do a goods issue to the order using transaction “C”
• Do a work confirmation to the order using transaction “D”
• Close the order by changing the order status (using transaction “B” again)

If your business is a large enterprise, it could cost thousands of dollars to get your team members up to speed with the software. For these reasons, we’ve switched over to our custom Plant Maintenance Cockpit software to combat the lengthy training times and high overhead of the base system. Instead of training your team members to recognize individual transactions, they can dedicate themselves more to their functional business areas.

In this accelerator, the Plant Maintenance Cockpit (PMC), a group of menus categorized by workflow makes it simple to navigate between creating, updating, and deleting a variety of objects, such as emergency orders, unplanned orders, and notifications.