Operations and maintenance professionals now use the terms “equipment” and “assets” interchangeably. In earlier times, equipment was meant to signify the actual physical machinery where maintenance work was done and uptime monitored, while assets were something referenced by the financial accounting team to track net book value and depreciation methods. The distinction between the two terms is certainly more blurred these days with all disciplines generally referring to the assets in an organization.
Effective use of assets helps organizations strategically align to their business goals, ensure customer satisfaction on the products purchased, and lower overall operating costs through higher ROI on the assets. Across all operations, whether it be production, maintenance, logistics, safety, or finance, team members need to be completely confident that their system(s) data accurately reflects the active assets in their environment. This alignment cannot be accomplished if the asset master data is incomplete, erroneous or simply untrustworthy.
This is where SAP’s Asset Information Workbench (AIW) by Utopia solution can really be beneficial. In addition to harnessing all the capabilities of SAP Master Data Governance for Enterprise Asset Management (MDG-EAM), SAP AIW brings additional functionality when creating or maintaining complex asset systems and sub-systems. SAP AIW allows you to create or maintain complete hierarchical structures typically consisting of multi-level functional locations depicting the major systems with the appropriate equipment/sub-equipment installed, and expanding the hierarchy all the way down to the suitable BOMs, task lists, maintenance plans, measurement points, and documents. Data inheritance from the parent functional location and/or equipment through to the linked “child” objects ensures consistent informational relationships throughout even the most multifaceted hierarchies. Furthermore, using MDG’s BRF+ (Business Rule Framework), additional verification of the data fields within each element of the structure can be checked for alignment to the asset data contained in SAP Asset Accounting master data fields. Sophisticated multi-step workflows can span across functional departments so all invested subject matter experts can be assured of data integrity before the information is updated to the SAP ECC or S/4HANA system.
This is just a small glimpse of SAP’s AIW by Utopia solution and how it can be used to increase asset data visibility and completeness across various departments that rely on this data. To learn more about SAP AIW by Utopia, visit: https://www.utopiainc.com/sap-asset-information-data-workbench
