Plant Maintenance (PM) in SAP Overview
Plant Maintenance (PM) operates the overall maintenance business processes and functions.The Plant Maintenance module allows a maintenance organization to: Identify, document, and correct failures and degradations of any equipment for which they have maintenance responsibility.
Plan and schedule activities to prevent or predict failures and keep assets and processes operating within design specifications. Both Corrective and Preventative maintenance processes exist in the Plant Maintenance module.
Corrective maintenance refers to the activities conducted by the Maintenance Organization to repair equipment of all forms within their area of responsibility. Preventive maintenance is a discipline that uses processes and activities that focus on the prevention of failures or performance degradation before it occurs.
Plant Maintenance (PM) in SAP
Plant Maintenance is closely integrated to MM, FICO and PP Module.
If you are just learning SAP Plant Maintenance or beginner in SAP ERP, I bet you are going to be confused with so many terms of SAP Plant Maintenance module.
Bellows are the history of SAP Plant maintenance from SAP R/3 to the latest name, so don’t be confuse.
1. SAP R/3
No 1: SAP PM module: Maintenance of internal assets
No 2: Customer Service (CS) module: Maintenance of customers’ assets
2. SAP Product Life cycle Management (PLM)
SAP solution that takes into account the lifecycle of a product with the accompanying data, and thus encompasses development, operational phase, together with shutdown and disposal.
3. Asset Life-Cycle Management (ALM)
Function area of SAP PLM, encompassing Plant Maintenance and Customer Service. (Now obsolete and replaced by Enterprise Asset Management).
4. SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): SAP solution for controlling and planning the core areas of a company (accounting, human resources, logistics, corporate services such as real estate management, travel management, and strategic enterprise planning).
5. Enterprise Asset Management
Function area of SAP ERP, for maintaining technical assets.
6. Enterprise Asset Management (in the wider sense)
Totality of all the life cycle phases of an asset (investment planning, project management, vendor selection, project execution, maintenance, external procurement, shutdown, performance management).
Mapping the entire life cycle of a technical asset can be achieved by combining the respective function areas of SAP ERP.
Also See: Quick Tour of the SAP User Interface