SAP IAM Explained

SAP has unveiled the SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite of solutions.

This suite brings collaborative asset intelligence, planning, prediction, and simulation to equipment maintenance and operation. SAP IAM is disrupting the conventional method of planned maintenance by developing machine learning algorithms that utilise data drawn from equipment to create predictive analytics, enabling SAP’s clients to maximise productivity.

SAP EAM Enterprise Asset Management planned maintenance is a traditional approach, in SAP ERP this plant maintenance is the foundation of what SAP has offered customers to improve maintenance efficiency. This allowed customers to create plans, do inspections, receive notifications, manage work orders and schedule resources.

Now, with SAP IAM a whole new opportunity in the world of Asset Performance Management (APM) has developed over the last few years, in which companies use asset intelligence to improve maintenance operations.

Customers want to use real-time asset data to move beyond regular planned maintenance to more predictive and prescriptive techniques.

Asset Performance Management (APM) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) work together to help businesses run their assets.

The APM capabilities needed for IAM did not exist in SAP five years ago and customers needed to use third-party solutions, spreadsheets or create in-house analytics. Companies may have had some asset condition data from sensors, they could not process it or combine it into their business processes. SAP released Asset Intelligence Network (AIN) a few years ago, which was the beginning of the SAP Intelligence Asset Management cloud suite. This allows suppliers, operators and service partners to collaborate and share asset information across the enterprise. SAP have built on this and added predictive maintenance and service (PDMS) for sensor based condition monitoring and analysis, including engineering insights for simulations based on material science.

SAP has also added a solution called Asset Strategy and Performance Management (ASPM) for risk and reliability based maintenance. It uses risk, reliability and impact analysis to segment assets, which clients can use to create the optimal maintenance strategy across the portfolio and align these plans with available resources and budgets.

SAP planned maintenance, whilst a useful approach, could lead to over-maintenance.

Companies are increasingly using sensor-based condition monitoring to maintain assets when needed. Doing a strategic analysis of a corporate asset portfolio and then decide which assets to maintain on planned cycles, which to maintain using sensor-based predictive techniques and which to replace for better performance management at lower risk and cost.

Customer Choice

The Intelligence Asset Network is about creating a central repository of all assets on the cloud, which would enable the business to access asset information, like a shared service function. Another benefit is to allow collaboration with suppliers and service partners thus building a collaborative framework.

This addresses several trends across manufacturing and asset intensive industries. SAP believes that the Intelligence Asset Network would help facilitate that through hassle-free collaboration and new business processes. 

The IAM suite is built on SAP Cloud Platform, allowing interoperability and integration with SAP and non SAP solutions, and cloud adoption with extensibility if customers want to enhance or add their own capability. It uses capabilities form SAP Leonardo portfolio such as machine learning for predictive analytics, and SAP IoT for device connectivity.

Asset manufacturers want to sell products as a service and asset operators want to receive more value-added services from their suppliers.

data from sensors is combined with the business processes in the SAP solutions. As an example a sensor feed through IoT from an asset in the field could be used to predict a possible fault or a potential fault in the near future, and automatically notify an engineer in that area to inspect it. With SAP Leonardo, this could be taken a step further and actually predict when faults occur based on data history and probability analysis.

SAP Intelligent Asset Management can help package intelligence in a way that reduces the overall cost of equipment maintenance for ERP customers.

SAP IAM suite of applications can be delivered in the cloud. SAP has a huge focus on its Customer first strategy, with SAP IAM ease of use, ease of adoption, and advanced features like predictive maintenance seem to be a core to this suite.

My name is Mike Davis and I have been managing and supporting transformational change within major corporates for over 20 years. I am a keen contributor to the digital agenda and would be very interested in supporting and advising on successfully delivering business transformation change programs. Feel free to review my LinkedIn profile and should you wish to have a brief confidential discussion, a project or program review or engagement for a bid or program delivery please do not hesitate in contacting me.