Why driving operational efficiency in SAP Plant Maintenance starts with master data quality
By Jeanette Mifsud on Nov 20, 2019
Poor quality or missing data in SAP can have serious financial consequences for your maintenance operations. Poor equipment performance due to ineffective maintenance plans can cost you dearly in business disruption, wasted labor hours, and even in regulatory fines. Excess spares inventory and expedited parts delivery also add to the real costs of bad data. According to The International Society of Automation, factories lose between 5-20% of their productive capacity from downtime.
Efficient plant maintenance operations depend on the quality of your underlying master data, and with SAP, there is a lot of data to set up and maintain and often times it’s a manual process which is time consuming and error prone.
Automating the creation and maintenance of your plant maintenance master data will enable you to continually improve operational efficiency, lower maintenance costs, and reduce risk of equipment failure. Maintenance teams can use Winshuttle software to build Excel-based solutions that speed up the creation and update of technical object and planning master data and eliminate manual data entry from the SAP GUI. Scenarios include:
- Data migration: Easily move data from a legacy plant maintenance system (like IBM’s Maximo) to SAP’s PM module.
- Mass master data set up: Load data much faster when you acquire new plants, equipment or infrastructure.
- Mass updates: Quickly extract, change and upload thousands of records at a time and validate data before it’s entered into SAP.
- Day-to-day creation and updates: Speed up creating or updating master data records, like equipment, functional location, and spare parts.
The table to the right shows the most common master data tasks our customers automate with Winshuttle and the average time saved by eliminating manual data entry into SAP.
| Technical Object Task | T-Code | Time saved |
| Create/change functional location | IL01/IL02 | 95%/85% |
| Create/change equipment | IE01/IE02 | 96%/75% |
| Create/change materials | MM01/MM02 | 89%/77% |
| Change equipment serial number | IQ02 | 84% |
| Create work center | IR01 | 93% |
| Create/change equipment BoMs | IB01/IB02 | 81%/67% |
| Manage classes & characteristics | CL02/CT04 | 91% |
These time savings can really add up over time, with Winshuttle maintenance teams save 565 working days on average per year by automating SAP data entry—valuable time your skilled resources can use to optimize maintenance operations.
Maintenance teams operate under the mandate to continuously improve operations, and Winshuttle software provides the metrics and reports you need to track how much time and cost your team has saved by automating their SAP data management tasks. .. Fora more in-depth look at how master data impacts your ability to execute on plant maintenance initiatives, download our eBook, Improve the Efficiency of Your SAP Plant Maintenance Operations.
About the author
Jeanette Mifsud
Jeanette leads the product marketing team at Winshuttle and has over 25 years experience helping technology companies define and market products that solve real-world problems for customers around the globe. Although based in our Bothell, WA headquarters, Jeanette hails from the UK.
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