Written by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting

Running a factory in today’s global, interconnected economy seems to get more difficult with each passing year. Sourcing parts from an increasingly constrained global supply chain, and ensuring that the right people with the right skills are on the shop floor at the right time to meet production goals is only getting harder. Add to those twin juggling acts the need to keep valuable shop floor assets up and running to meet growing demand, and without a doubt the ability of a manufacturing company to meet its obligations to its customers presents an increasingly complex challenge.

The process of detecting a problem in a valuable asset and getting it repaired as quickly as possible requires a tremendous amount of cooperation and collaboration between a variety of stakeholders– maintenance supervisors, OEM service managers, field service managers and technicians, procurement professionals and the like – most of whom will find themselves trying to coordinate their actions using outdated and largely disconnected applications and services. All too often these stakeholders find themselves chasing down information about the asset, the customer, the technician’s qualifications, the spare parts supply, and the repair job itself from a hodgepodge of screens and databases, adding considerable complexity and risk to the process.

An offline asset can become an enormously costly problem: a robot, press, or other asset that is out of service can stop an assembly line cold, and it’s not just the production schedule that’s jeopardized. The downstream risks of leaving an important customer in the lurch, waiting for a time-sensitive delivery, could mean late penalties and the potential loss of future business. Leaving this to an antiquated process running on a set of equally antiquated applications presents an increasingly unacceptable – and unnecessary – risk.

In order to reduce this risk and support customers in need of more efficient, streamlined processes, SAP has brought to market a better way to solve the asset maintenance problem: an integrated, end-to-end process, using a combination of SAP’s Cloud ERP services and other cloud assets, that can significantly reduce the time it takes to bring an asset back online. In doing so SAP’s integrated asset maintenance process allows the different stakeholders to access the same information and maintain an accurate view of the status of the asset and the repair job. Integration is the key: Just upgrading the functionality of a single application in the process won’t solve the problem. Without a unified process that allows the stakeholders to share data and coordinate their actions, upgrading any individual step along the way still leaves the success of the entire process at risk.

If the issue of asset maintenance is important to your business, or you’d like to know more about how SAP supports modern, cloud-based end-to-end processes, Enterprise Applications Consulting has produced a report that highlights how SAP approaches the critical issue of asset maintenance using a collaborative process that synchronizes the individual tasks, and the roles of the different stakeholders involved, around an integrated set of cloud-based services.

Download the report and give it a read. To learn more about SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration, visit us online. And let us know about your challenges and successes with respect to asset maintenance in the comments section below.