Hello, how are you today?
Let’s look briefly at the equipment master in SAP PM today. What is an Equipment master? Good question.
SAP has what is called the “Technical Object Structure” which is a bit like an asset list and the Equipment Master is a part of this. It holds information about an individual item of equipment and is very important in reliability engineering. The technical object structure in SAP is a hierarchical structure that represents the organisation of your plant. Functional Locations, Equipments, Assemblies and Bills of Materials are a part of the Technical Object Structure.
The equipment master is the record for an item of equipment and contains a lot of data of interest to the Maintenance Manager, Reliability Engineer, Planner, Supervisor and Technician.
Let’s have a look at a few of the fields of data and talk about what they are.
Rule 1
Some of this data is duplicated in the Material Master (transaction MM03). You need to decide where it is best kept. I’m sure you don’t want to maintain data in 2 separate places. Often it is best kept in the material master.
These are in R/3 version 4.6C which is very similar to 4.7
Equipment Category
This field is populated when you create an Equipment Master record. You define the different equipment types in configuration. This field helps with managing equipment. Some examples of equipment categories are
o Rotable equipment
o Traceable equipment
o Statutory equipment (such as pressure vessels which have statutory maintenance requirements)
o Asbestos (equipment contains asbestos)
o Mobile equipment
o Cranage
The types of categories should be decided in the context of your business processes. That is, what is required to support the way your company manages its assets. Don't try to use this for managing equipment criticality, that is what the ABC indicator is for.
User status.
This is defined by your business to assist in managing assets. Types of users statuses could be
o Being tested
o Being repaired
o Decommissioned / Retired
o Scrapped
o RCA investigation
o RCM analysis
o Warranty (warranty management in SAP is pretty average)
User status’s can be used for searching for equipments, in reporting and for flagging the current status of the equipment
Valid from date
Generally identifies the date from when the equipment became operational, also has been used as the installed date
Determines from when the meantime between failure calculations begin. If this date is not entered the mean time between failures calculations begin at the time the first notification is created for it.
Expiry date
Gives the end date of service. In most cases, this would be open ended, but there will be occasions an end date is entered such as an equipment trial or perhaps lease equipment.
Address field
There is an address field under the Location tab. I have only seen it used occasionally but some uses are
When test equipment is allocated to a technician. Create an equipment master for the test gear and include all the relevant data. When the test gear is given to a technician, record who has it in the address field.
If your company is into facilities management, building addresses can be added. I wouldn’t use it as a substitute for maintenance plant, plant section etc, as that doesn’t fit the way SAP has been designed.
That will do for today, I will talk more about fields in the equipment master in my next Blog where I will also discuss the class overview.
If you have any questions on what fields are used for, please drop me a line to mick@windsorbusinesssolutions.com.au
Keep safe & kind regards
with compliments
Mick
Mick Windsor
Windsor Business Solutions Pty Ltd
e-mail: mick@windsorbusinesssolutions.com.au
web site: www.WindsorBusinessSolutions.com.au