Business processes in SAP PM

Business processes in SAP PM ensures that maintenance tasks are performed in a competent, cost-effective, consistent, and safe manner. Maintenance tasks may be preventive, predictive, or include nondestructive inspections in order to categorize or monitor flaws. RCM is one component of an inclusive end to end asset management program. For a smooth business run we need a clean and accurate master data also.

Broadly we can say that there are two types of business processes in SAP PM:

• Unplanned Maintenance: Unplanned maintenance is an event in manufacturing area where an exceptional situation occurrs all of sudden and machine starts underperforming or does not work at all. The machine needs immediate attention from maintenance department.
  • For example:
    • Abnormal sound in a pump
    • Winding of a motor burnt and motor fails to start
• Planned Maintenance: Planned maintenance is a scheduled maintenance where everything is done a well planned way. Date of maintenance, frequency of maintenance is fixed. Maintenance is done according to a check list.
  • For example:
    • Monthly inspection of a boiler
    • Annual overhauling of a compressor

Detail list of business processes in SAP PM

Here is the SAP PM business processes list:

Unplanned processes (2 processes)

Unplanned maintenance can be sub-divided into two processes:

1. Breakdown maintenance
2. Emergency maintenance

Let us discuss above processes one by one:

1. Breakdown maintenance:

• When a technical object (or machine) in plant area fails to start. It means it is under breakdown.
• The machine is not available for production.
• Such cases are highly critical for maintennce department because maintenance department has to ensure high availability of machine.
• The duration of unavailability, start and end date/time are important to track. It helps to calculate the breakdown duration.
• Mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between repair (MTBR) are also calculated for Breakdown maintenance
• Breakdown can happen with a non critical machine also
• Breakdown (or Tripping) report is must with root cause analysis (also known as Why Why analysis)

2. Emergency maintenance

• Emergency maintenance is the situation when immediate response is required from maintenance department because the equipment under maintenance is highly critical for business.
• Any kind of malfunction can result into major production loss.
• It is not necessary that machine has stopped working or failed to start.
• Even if there is an abnormal sound in a critical machine, emergency action is required from maintenance department.

Planned processes (8 Processes)

1. Corrective maintenance
2. Preventive maintenance
3. Predictive maintenance
4. Refurbishment process
5. Calibration process
6. Capital expenditure (CAPEX)
7. Shutdown maintenance
8. Spare parts management 

Business Processes as per S4 HANA Best Practices

As per SAP S4 HANA Best practices there are new processes introduced by SAP. Few of the business processes are renamed and few are newly introduced. Here is the list:

1. Corrective maintenance (BH1)
2. Emergency maintenance (BH2)
3. Preventive maintenance (BJ2)
4. Reactive maintenance (4HH) (New)
5. Proactive maintenance (4HI) (New)
6. Operational and Overhead maintenance(4WM) (New)
7. Improvement maintenance (4VT) (New)
8. Maintenance resource scheduling (43R) (New)