Predictive Maintenance

5 Steps to Consider Before Launching

Introduction
Maintenance is an integral part of life in order to keep things in working order. It is especially
important in an industrial setting where equipment and machines work tirelessly. Regular
preventative maintenance has been a semi-science balancing objective and subjective
considerations when determining when service is required. However, with the transition from basic
computerization to cyber-physical connections of Industry 4.0, data becomes available to drive
predictive maintenance. Yet, there are a few prerequisites in order to prepare your operations for it.

They are:

● Master data
● Maintenance strategy
● IoT connectivity
● Maintenance history
● Predictive analysis

Our list includes examples from the SAP Predictive Asset Insights (PAI) solution, which is part
of the SAP Intelligent Asset Management suite. However, each area contributes an important
part to your predictive maintenance foundation regardless of the solution you choose.
Additionally, there may be partial aspects already in place which only require a refresh.

Master Data
It is important to review existing master data to make sure they are of proper quality and structure
that accurately accounts for all the installed assets. Without clean information, you cannot benefit
from the advanced analytics and machine learning. Clean and clearly structured master data can
accelerate the task of importing into a predictive maintenance system tremendously and avoid
inconsistencies.

All solutions of the SAP Intelligent Asset Management suite rely on a common asset
repository called Asset Central Foundation. With SAP PAI you are not starting from scratch like
with other third-party solutions because you will not have to recreate your equipment data
and structures which are already in your maintenance system (e.g. SAP Plant
Maintenance or S/4HANA Maintenance Management). The seamless integration of the PAI
solution allows you to port your data directly into Asset Central Foundation. It will make use
of your existing and carefully maintained master data across all of the Intelligent Asset
Management solutions.

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The following figure shows an equipment that was synchronized to Asset Central from an SAP ECC
system:

Maintenance Strategy
Furthermore, it is crucial to understand the existing equipment structure to determine in which
scenario predictive maintenance can be a suitable measure to mitigate risks regarding
breakdowns and other respective ramifications. For certain equipment you might decide to wait
and let them run to failure as the impact of a breakdown is very low. For other assets, you might still
need a daily inspection because that is the only way to detect a certain issue. However, you most
likely will not equip your coffee machines with sensors to ensure productivity in your production
facilities, or maybe you will, due to the importance of coffee for your team. The SAP Intelligent Asset
Management suite provides another solution called SAP Health Prediction and Optimization for
that purpose. Below is an example of an equipment for which a high risk was detected through a
risk and criticality assessment.

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IoT Connectivity
The next preparation step highly depends on your status regarding plant connectivity, capabilities
and sensors on target equipment. These factors determine what needs to be applied to
implement IoT connectivity and set the basis for real-time data collection and prediction. The
Intelligent Asset Management portfolio provides an “IoT Service”, which allows the connection of
raw sensor data to SAP Leonardo IoT. It can be used to transform and map the data to your existing
equipment and its structures in Asset Central Foundation that was introduced in the Master Data
section. In case you already collected raw sensor data in the past, this information can easily be
uploaded into SAP Leonardo IoT and serve as an input for predictive maintenance algorithms.
The following figure displays the IoT monitoring view within SAP Predictive Asset Insights:

Maintenance History
It is important to understand previous equipment failures and maintenance history provides some
insight. The amount, quality and relevance of data has a major effect on the performance of
predictive maintenance algorithms. Therefore, a company must focus on collecting clean and
reasonable data that is relevant in terms of equipment performance and the time of any event or
failure occurrence.

Clean data in the context of predictive maintenance means that the collected data is
non-erroneous and none is missing in the timeline. Since many companies already use SAP Plant
Maintenance or S/4HANA Maintenance Management to execute their maintenance operations,
there is typically plenty of existing information. The quality of the data needs to be reviewed before
automatically synchronizing into Asset Central Foundation for further analysis in SAP
Predictive Asset Insights.

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The best way to efficiently drive your
maintenance execution and collect an
accurate and meaningful maintenance history
is a mobile solution such as SAP Asset
Manager. This option is part of the Intelligent
Asset Management Portfolio. The following
screenshot shows how the maintenance
history is displayed within the IoT
monitoring view of SAP Predictive Asset
Insights. There are other views that show
more detail if required.

Predictive Analysis
Once you have your clean data, connectivity and historical records in place, you need to train the
algorithmic models so they can determine what is healthy and what is faulty. Otherwise, the system
will not be able to determine anomalies in your operations, nor provide estimates, such as the
remaining useful life. SAP does include a so-called Machine Learning Engine (MLE), which is the
heart of predictive techniques enabling several algorithms such as anomaly detection or failure
prediction. Anomaly detection automatically determines if sensor data of a single sensor or in
combination with other sensor values of the same equipment deviate significantly from previous
records. Depending on the result, an alert notification is triggered.

Failure prediction is a more sophisticated approach because it automatically classifies certain

deviations in real-time sensor values based on historical data. Additionally, these past records can
be combined with backend data, such as breakdown notifications within the same timeframe, to
indicate patterns for any applied algorithm. The historical data will be used as input to train
machine learning models and algorithms.

Algorithms for Equipment Health Indicators (SAP)

● Anomaly detection with principal component analysis

● Distance-based failure analysis using Earth Mover’s distance
● Anomaly detection using multivariate autoregression
● Failure prediction using tree ensemble classifier
● One class support vector machine (SVM) for anomaly detection
● Logistic regression for failure prediction
● Anomaly detection using interquartile range
● Failure prediction using automatic failure prediction
● Anomaly detection using automatic anomaly detection

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The developed model can further be applied to unseen data in order to predict a failure or an
anomaly regarding the current state of an asset. Based on the output of those machine learning
models, rules can be configured, e.g. to automatically create a maintenance notification or send
alert notifications before a breakdown occurs.

The following example shows the output of an automatic failure prediction algorithm on the
timeline together with a real notification that occurred during that time. As you can understand
from failure score and failure class values, the issue was already predicted almost one day before it
occurred and could have been prevented with appropriate measures.

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Conclusion
As a popular Benjamin Franklin saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Incorporate
these five items into your transition checklist, which should also include winning over stakeholders
and a training plan.

Once predictive maintenance is fully implemented, it helps you to

● reduce expensive reactive maintenance costs and
● provide operators with further support for decision making.

This has a great potential to add business value.

The whole product portfolio of SAP Predictive Asset Insights enables companies to improve
their maintenance operations significantly because it offers a wide range of functionalities to
consolidate and display information about equipment.

Contact us to discover how SAP Intelligent Asset Management and predictive maintenance can
help you achieve your business objectives.

Start a conversation
with our experts today
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