SAP Plant Maintenance (PM)

SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) is a component of the SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) that helps businesses support and maintain equipment and systems.

SAP PM integrates with other ECC components like Materials Management (MM), Quality Management (QM), Production Planning (PP), Sales and Distribution (SD), Finance (FI), Controlling (CO), and Human Resources (HR).

SAP PM is comprised of components for the three main activities that help companies to maintain systems or equipment:

• Inspection, which establishes the actual condition of the systems or equipment;
• Preventive maintenance, which helps to maintain ideal conditions for the system or equipment; and
• Repair, for restoring the systems or equipment.

SAP PM allows you to manage maintenance requests and perform some repairs automatically. You can use it to record the problems in the ECC, plan labor and material activities, and record and settle costs.

SAP PM's integration with the other ECC modules keeps the data in the module current and automatically triggers processes in the other functions when required. For example, a Repair activity may trigger a purchase requisition for non-stock materials in MM or purchasing.

There are generally four groups of users that benefit most from SAP PM:

• Maintenance and operations managers, who can use PM to obtain metrics on equipment performance or maintenance deployments. They can use PM to improve maintenance decision-making by running reports on work that's planned, in process, or completed. Management can also budget for equipment replenishment by having accurate and up-to-date data on equipment maintenance history and relative maintenance costs.
• Production line workers and equipment users, who can use PM to manage maintenance issues more promptly and effectively. For example, preventive maintenance issues can be coordinated with production and unplanned maintenance to ensure that the work is done quickly and doesn't affect production.
• Maintenance personnel and technicians, who can use PM to improve work processes and efficiency. For example, technicians can use PM to review maintenance records.
• Purchasing departments, who can use PM to manage and execute the purchase of non-stock spare parts and services needed for maintenance work. These groups are generally integrated with maintenance groups.

Everything in SAP PM revolves around master data, which stored in and manipulated in centralized master data tables. master data types in PM include equipment, functional location, class (specifications for objects), characteristics, task lists, catalog (data about maintenance history in codes), construction types (materials BOMs), measuring points, and counters (captured data about equipment use, such as wear and tear or consumption). The master data is used to create transactional data in the SAP ECC, such as creating a maintenance record in PM, purchase order in MM, production order in PP, or sales order in SD.