The Perfect Plant and Asset Management

When you examine SAP’s Perfect Plant initiative (there’s an overview in my earlier post), you’ll find that part of the journey to better alignment of production performance with enterprise objectives is concerned with focusing attention on three key areas: asset performance, operational scheduling and planning, and manufacturing execution.

Another important issue to factor in concerns organizational culture: as with any major initiative, everybody has to be on board for the journey. And some organizations have a long way to go. Actenum co-sponsored an Aberdeen Group study in December 2006 that looked at maintenance practices in 300 organizations. Among other findings, Aberdeen reported that almost half of the survey respondents stated that “Management does not see maintenance as a top priority.” This type of statement and the mindset that gives rise to it points to a large obstacle in the way of the Perfect Plant strategy: the culture has to be changed before anything else can be done. In my experience, this isn’t just a management culture issue, either. It’s often found right through the organization, from management down to the plant floor.

Looking at the Perfect Plant’s three key focus areas, solutions need to be put in place that provide:

• Greater attention to proactive asset management practices;
• Linkage of maintenance activities to production operations;
• Rapid, reliable, and informed planning and scheduling of equipment;
• Ability to respond in real-time to changes and disruptions in the operational process;
• Improved support for decisions around operational execution.

That all makes sense. For example, software that links maintenance and production planning would allow for better collaboration between maintenance and production management, and would enable everybody concerned to assess the impact of equipment shutdowns on production output. Breakdowns and reactive maintenance would be easier to handle with software that rescheduled operations automatically, and that allowed tweaking of results by operational experts (there’s a role for Actenum MPS here).

But what do you find if you compare the existing SAP and SAP partner solution capabilities with this list of high-level needs shown above? Quite a few items that aren’t addressed. There’s not much available apart from the traditional approaches and tools, and these really just provide support for manual activities. The entire decision-making burden is still on the user.

I think that the Perfect Plant initiative is a good idea. It draws attention to important aspects of running a complex production environment. There’s a useful framework of applications and best practices that businesses can draw on to improve their operations. But I also think that we’ll have to (a) deal with the cultural/change-management issues, and (b) wait until solution capabilities start to catch up to the vision, to see the real benefits appear.