SAP xApp Mobile Asset Management

Equipment downtime is expensive. It reduces output, cuts revenue, and even impairs service delivery to customers. That's why maintenance organizations, tasked with ensuring continuous operations, must work quickly and efficiently. Experts estimate that maintenance costs in asset-intensive industries often represent a significant portion of operating costs. But despite the best efforts of all those involved in asset management processes, a significant portion of the money spent annually on maintenance is wasted. Why?

For one thing, service technicians often have trouble finding the information they need to handle repair and maintenance jobs effectively. They may have to make several trips to and from the work site to collect missing equipment documentation, equipment service histories, service contracts, or warranty status documents before they can complete their tasks. This delay extends downtime and gives the maintenance crew less time in the field. Such costly inefficiency means maintenance workers may spend significantly less than a full working day applying their skills to the equipment requiring service.

Back in the office, outmoded paper-based processes eat up more of the field technician's time. Most maintenance activities require full documentation, so when a task is complete, a technician is expected to fill out the relevant form completely, accurately, and legibly and then, later, turn it in for entry into the back-end software. In reality, given the technician's busy workload, the forms are rarely completed fully or accurately. They are done quickly whenever the technician is back in the office. Eventually they are submitted to someone with minimal knowledge of the work that was done. This person reviews the form, extracts data from it, and adds that data into the maintenance software. During this process, forms get lost, misplaced, or misfiled, which causes further delays or, worse, leads to incorrect data entries.