With OPRA, a household appliance manufacturer has established user-friendly and process-oriented maintenance in SAP.
Where production plants are increasingly digitally networked today, the image of maintenance is also changing. OPRA is DATAGROUP's answer to digitalization in the industry. The SAP-based application for the maintenance of mobile and stationary systems and devices offers the user intuitive and process-oriented user interfaces as well as comprehensive and context-related information "at the touch of a button".
Maintenance of production lines
The household appliance manufacturer not only has to maintain its entire production lines, tools and buildings, but also its supply systems and building services. As a long-standing SAP user, the company has been using SAP EAM (Enterprise Asset Management - formerly Plant Maintenance) in Europe for more than twenty years, in the USA since 1995 and in China for three years.
Due to the size of the company, the SAP ERP system is divided up in several ways. There are two development systems for customizing and program development, one for Europe and one for the USA/China, which are then integrated into a separate factory production system in each region. In addition, there are various other parallel production systems such as FI/CO, CMD, SRM, Service and others, which of course communicate actively with each other.
Simplifying the SAP landscape
For some years now, the company has been in the process of simplifying this SAP landscape and standardizing its processes worldwide. While each plant used to have its own SAP system, these were merged into a standardized SAP "net-F" system in Europe between 2003 and today. The US sites have been working together on the new factory system in their own productive landscape since 2016.
In 2015, the topic of Industry 4.0 became increasingly important. Parts of production were shifted to manufacturing execution systems (= MES, the process-oriented operating level of a multi-layered production management system), while other parts were transferred to the ERP system. MES are increasingly becoming the control level and the link between ERP and machine control.
In this context, the company would also like to modernize and accelerate its maintenance. In the search for a suitable system within the company and on the open market, they soon came across OPRA. OPRA's functionality fits very well into the company's SAP and production landscape, which is why the product was chosen. In addition, DATAGROUP's cost-benefit ratio was unbeatable. OPRA is fully SAP-integrated, mobile-ready and complements SAP EAM with user-friendliness, process orientation and the seamless integration of third-party systems. This enables the technical, functional and visual integration of equipment, people, processes, data and systems in SAP.
Working directly on the assembly line in SAP
The maintenance staff have OPRA mobile clients on their smartphones and tablets. This allows them to stand next to the system on the assembly line and check whether a spare part is available on site in SAP in the event of a malfunction. They can reserve or even book it, take it directly from the warehouse and add it to the maintenance order. This means that the maintenance technician no longer has to walk to a terminal and saves a lot of travel time on the long production lines. Otherwise, if a system breaks down, he or she has to run back and forth between the system and the SAP terminal several times to inspect the damage here, create an order there, check whether the required spare part is in stock according to the parts list, etc.
The customer's IT department sees further advantages in the solution: with the new technology and the Fiori interfaces, the company is now well positioned for the new SAP product generation. The introduction of OPRA was almost a kind of pre-project for S/4HANA. This allowed users in the company to get a feel for what working with SAP Fiori interfaces will look like in the future. Networked production systems and SAP-integrated value creation processes - with this duo, the household appliance manufacturer is resolutely driving forward digitalization in-house.
