Maintenance directly from SAP

The transmission system operator manages its technical systems and maps their structure in the SAP maintenance module PM. The systems are documented, from construction to scrapping, in almost 400,000 plans, drawings, operating manuals, etc.; with versions, there are almost one million documents.

These are stored in paper form at documentation workstations in eleven foremen's areas across the eastern federal states. In the past, they were also stored digitally in a document management system (DMS), but this had no interface to SAP.

"Most DMS providers cannot offer direct IT integration into SAP processes due to the high logical complexity of the interfaces"

says Jens Scheffczyk, project manager and specialist responsible for technical documentation and SAP PM in the area of maintenance management.

In order to harmonize the content of SAP ERP and the plant documentation using terminology conventions, the maintenance department added entities such as orders, projects, equipment, material numbers and batches to the external DMS.

This meant that the technical locations and equipment were kept in two parallel systems. This meant that both had to be constantly synchronized manually - a high maintenance effort, and despite the utmost care, there were always differences in content between the two system landscapes.

Integrated SAP DMS solution

With the Document Control Center (DCC) from BDF, Ontras therefore introduced a solution at the end of 2015 that supplements SAP's own DMS module with essential functions. In conjunction with SAP PM, this enables Ontras to manage its documentation in the SAP DMS, with full integration and networking with other SAP business objects.

Ontras only has to map the structure of the equipment once in SAP PM and the DMS can access it automatically. The documents in the DMS are directly linked to the functional locations and equipment in SAP PM.

There are around 150 SAP users in the maintenance department, including around 70 who regularly use the DMS. The central documentation department in Leipzig fills the system with new documents and maintains existing ones; the maintenance staff and project managers out in the field use it to access documents.

This works either from a technical or organizational perspective. The technical view is higher-level and organizes the line network via the technical location structure in SAP.

The technical locations are therefore linked to the documents; each piece of equipment (gearbox, motor, ball valve, etc.) of a valve is assigned to its corresponding certificate (manufacturer's certificate), CAD document, etc. in the DMS.

Procurement: Origin of the documentation

The equipment is put on at the time of purchase and installed later at the technical site. Jens Scheffczyk:

"This integration of document management into the logistics procurement process was a key focus of the project. Procurement is the source of some of the documentation, which is why a seamless documentation chain is important."

The order item forms the basis for this. Using a specially developed process, the purchasing department can link documents created in procurement with the equipment in SAP PM and integrate them directly into the logistical operations of maintenance, new construction and conversion.

The second view of the technical documents is based on their organizational structure. It is intended for use by the maintenance technician on site and maps the physical or logical location of the documents. BDF has implemented this view on the basis of the SAP component for integrated product and process engineering (iPPE).

With the DCC solution, Ontras also received a new search cockpit that significantly expands the standard SAP document view. It can be used to search any object type of document and the user can search freely using combinable search queries.

Upper and lower case is not taken into account, there is no longer a character limit and performance is also higher than with conventional abap select statements. The logic for this was implemented on the basis of the SAP search engine T-Rex.

The migration from the old to the new system was a challenge for Ontras in that the manufacturer of the old system had discontinued its technical support. Documents and equipment had to be transferred that did not exist in SAP.

These had to be set in relation to data that already existed in the ERP (functional locations, projects, goods receipt postings). Using a special export tool from a partner company, it was possible to transfer the data in a structured manner into a defined file format geared towards SAP, load it into SAP's own intermediate layer and convert or revise it at the same time.

Around one million document info records and other associated objects were then generated on the basis of this layer and linked to the existing SAP data.