New SAP service and asset management solution drives revenue, cuts costs

With asset and service management being the last two areas in which already lean organisations can still significantly reduce costs, global business solutions giant, SAP, has refined a number of its existing solutions into a product set that provides advanced capabilities in these two areas.

"SAP's new Service and Asset Management (SAM) solution also helps organisations drive new revenue by easily adding service and maintenance capabilities to what would traditionally have been a manufacturing or sales operation only," said Dean Fitt, SAP Germany's enterprise asset management solution manager, during a visit to South Africa in September to alert customers to the release of SAP SAM during the last quarter of 2004.

"Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), for instance, are entering an entirely new area of growth by creating long-term service relationships with customers and, thereby, acquiring repeat business.

"At the same time, there's a trend towards outsourcing management of assets either to third parties or back to OEMs. A large organisation, for example, will outsource the maintenance and service of its vehicle fleet of 25 000 to the OEM. This reduces the costs of its vehicle assets for the customer and gives the OEM an additional revenue stream from fleet management as well as the opportunity to recycle its own assets by selling the vehicles off after a period in the customer's service.

"And, of course, for automotive companies and organisations that supply heavy equipment to mining, agriculture, and industry effective parts and service management is a key differentiator as well as a means of improving productivity and the bottom line. It's also a means of assuring the OEMs for whom they distribute equipment and parts that they are delivering the right quality of service on their behalf.

"For all these reasons, service and asset management have achieved mainstream status as business disciplines and are most efficiently and effectively implemented only with the right technology. Technology that enables easy integration into other key business disciplines such as financial control and planning, human resources and supplier and customer relationship management.

"SAP SAM is the only software on the market that provides such comprehensive support for OEMs, asset owners and operators, and third party service providers."

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SAP SAM is divided into three business scenarios - service management, service parts management, and enterprise asset management.

The service management scenario, geared for OEMs, local distributors and service providers, facilitates the management of parts and service level agreements. Each element of the solution is built for individual customers out of relevant modules of mySAP ERP and mySAP CRM. "We match functionality to the customer's need," Fitt says.

The services parts management scenario is geared for the automotive industry, suppliers of large earth moving equipment and other large industrial organisations.

SAP SAM's enterprise asset management business scenario is geared for asset owners and operators and covers the full range of fixed and large movable assets, from fleets of dozers and chemical plants to oil refineries and information technology. Fitt says it is particularly useful in capital intensive industries where the cost of maintenance can be as high as 40% of operational costs.

SAP Africa's industrial division solution manager, Freek Malherbe, says that SAP SAM will be particularly useful to large South African industrial concerns, most of which have a mixed service and maintenance model - with some service and maintenance outsourced to original builders and commissioners and the rest undertaken in-house. "The solution will strip complexity out of their operations and provide a level of visibility into service, maintenance and asset management they've not been able to achieve before."