Facilities risk management is a process of identifying risk through risk assessment, risk ranking, and applying safeguards to mitigate risk.  A certain amount of risk reduction “credit” is taken for each safeguard applied.  Follow-up “safeguard validation” is needed to ensure assumed risk credit is actually realized.  Recording risk scenarios as structured relational data greatly simplifies safeguard validation and enables automated reporting processes (exception checking) to be used.     

SAP Plant Maintenance is a powerful tool for facilities asset management.  With proper architecture and methods, companies can query hundreds of thousands of records simultaneously for high-quality information with which to make operational decisions.  Unfortunately issues associated with software selection, implementation, and usage greatly diminish the effectiveness of the new ERP tools, in many cases rendering those systems into electronic equivalents of manual filing systems.  Data merging and assessment remain a data mining exercise for many companies.  The quality of corporate decision-making suffers as a result, which in turn can lead to less than optimal operational performance, and safety and environmental incidents.  Causes of these issues include lack of standard data practices, lack of engineering science and practical experience in solution design.

Enterprise Asset Management in the processing industries requires a focus on safety, reliability, and maintainability of equipment. Maintenance information is used to define and evaluate compliance with equipment reliability and maintainability requirements. Quality information comes from quality, structured data. Logic to store and classify data associated with technical objects is necessary to make the data readily accessible, retrievable, and comparable between similar technical objects. Such logic, called taxonomy, is structured hierarchically and based on the characteristics of technical objects.  Taxonomy greatly improves maintenance analyses and decision-making by improving information quality and availability. ISO 14224, Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment, promotes a standardized approach to taxonomy that maximizes the utility of data and facilitates data exchange.  This presentation describes how to configure SAP PM in a manner that rigorously captures the principles of ISO 14224 for standardized data collection and structuring of reliability and maintenance data.