Register for the SAP Innovation Day for Supply Chain on June 19, 2025
Every asset and field-service intensive organization today stands at a crossroads: skill gaps, labor shortages, aging assets creating reliability concerns, while data silos and poor data quality obstruct visibility and decision-making. Meanwhile, it’s expected to optimize cost, risk, and performance — simultaneously. Simply put, it’s no longer enough to solely perform maintenance and field service. To thrive, you need to crack the code for end-to-end, intelligent operations. The question is: how? Continue reading below!
Laying the Foundation — From Investment to Commission
World-class asset and field service management begins long before an asset is commissioned. SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management starts with strategic investment planning, ensuring alignment with business goals and future demand. From there, effective project delivery and commissioning practices ensure assets come online on time, on budget, and with minimal risk.
Collaboration across OEMs, the asset operator and service provider during construction and commissioning is critical — yet too often disconnected. SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration provides a single source of truth for all internal and external parties, facilitating a proper handover of data and documentation from external project management and construction companies to internal maintenance.
From Reactive to Proactive — Reliability Assessments & Recommendations
Once assets are in place, it is time to unlock their full potential and reliability! By creating risk and criticality assessments using SAP Asset Performance Management you understand where failure would hurt most in your organization.
A high risk score could lead to conducting specific reliability methodologies such as reliability centered maintenance (RCM) and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). To each RCM or FMEA you are able to attached specific recommendations, all directly in the system. Recommendations could range from creating a maintenance task list or a maintenance plan, to the recommendation to install a conditional maintenance rule.
Seeing the Unseen — Asset Health Monitoring
For your more critical assets, you might require making use of real-time, connected data. Many organizations have raw data available on their assets. The real magic happens when connecting this data to a business process.
That is where SAP Asset Performance Management can help with integrating IoT, inspection records, and sensor alerts to build a clear picture of asset health. This isn’t about monitoring for the sake of it — it’s about smart thresholds, meaningful alerts, and actionable insights. AI and automation play a crucial role, surfacing anomalies and recommending responses before failure occurs. By linking inspections with intelligent rules, teams move faster and smarter. The result? Increased uptime, safer operations, and less guesswork in day-to-day decision-making.
Precision in Action — Plan, Schedule, and Execute
Maintenance needs don’t arrive neatly scheduled. They come from everywhere — customer requests, inspections, breakdowns, upgrades, decommissioning. And in different forms too, with emergency breakdowns, routine time-based maintenance and (predictive) sensor alerts. The challenge lies in orchestrating it all efficiently.
Planning is just the beginning — true value is unlocked in execution. At certain volumes, it becomes impossible to schedule manually. How do you match the right skills to the right task, balancing urgency, availability, and location? That is where SAP Field Service Management comes in. (Mobile) work execution empowers technicians to go completely paperless. With real-time access to asset history, work orders, and safety protocols and the ability to execute work offline. As work is completed, structured feedback flows back into the system.
Keeping records accurate is key, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Now, you can orchestrate it all with ease. Your technicians are always in the right place at the right time. It’s like being the conductor of a perfectly timed orchestra!
Closing the Loop — SAP’s Unified Approach to Asset & Field Service Management
SAP helps organizations manage the full asset lifecycle in multiple ways. From capital investment all the way to decommissioning, and from maintenance strategy to execution, in one connected platform. As a result, assets are continuously linked from the ‘as designed’ and ‘as built’ phases to the ‘as maintained’ phase. This direct connection of historic data and documentation between all phases helps with optimizing not just individual departments, but the organization as a whole.
AI is not just a buzzword here — it’s key to SAP’s strategy and vision. Joule is being embedded as your copilot, and will help you create maintenance strategies, optimizing planning resources, and overall acting faster and smarter. Whether you’re planning for long-term reliability or managing work out in the field, SAP gives you the tools to stay in control with real-time insights, smart automation, and easy collaboration.
The best part? You don’t have to start tomorrow; you can start today already. Whether you’re running on SAP ECC or S/4HANA, the solutions covered in this blog integrate with both ERP systems, giving you a future-proof intelligent asset management platform for today and many years to come!
SAP Innovation Day for Supply Chain
Curious about SAP Asset & Field Service Management? Discover its potential at the SAP Innovation Day for Supply Chain on June 19, 2025! Dive into the Asset & Field Service Management track featuring insightful sessions from SAP experts and inspiring customer stories. Register now.
