SAP PM Maintenance Data Build Saves over $5 Million Per Year in Expenditures

The Challenge

A national oil field services company rapidly grew from a regional to a national player via organic growth and M&A activity. As a result of this growth, it was deploying new and expensive equipment to the field and into supporting operations. It did not have an opportunity to centralize a reliability and maintenance function nor implement a CMMS system to manage maintenance activities, thereby relying on local spreadsheets and online custom-developed databases.

As a result of not having a reliability and maintenance function, equipment was typically run to failure, which meant reserve equipment was required onsite in case of a breakdown to ensure service delivery was not impacted. This additional equipment was both costly and required significant logistical management.

To eliminate this cost and to improve its maintenance and reliability capability, our client set up a dedicated reliability and maintenance team and implemented a CMMS. However, no master data existed to seed the CMMS solution.

The Solution

A Sullexis team of maintenance data experts conducted a data gathering exercise, leveraging local sources of master data (the spreadsheets and online databases), equipment walk-downs, P&ID review, and working with the OEM to obtain equipment lists and recommended spare parts.

Then using Sullexis’s proprietary asset hierarchy tool, an eight-level hierarchy based on the ISO 14224 standard was created. Once the hierarchy tool was populated, workshops were conducted to visualize the hierarchy, its structure, and each piece of equipment’s master data, e.g., make, model, serial number, criticality, failure code, work center, etc. . Missing ‘nodes’ in the hierarchy were identified and tracked down, as well as any missing master data elements.

Once the hierarchy was reviewed and approved by the client’s maintenance team, our team performed the following:

  • Exported the approved data from the hierarchy tool into the SAP Load Template for importing into the new CMMS.
  • Identified Maintainable equipment.
  • Created Maintenance BOMs from vendor-provided documentation.
The Result

In two months, Sullexis successfully created the master data for the CMMS, which was organized correctly to reflect the equipment in the field by region, facility, and fleet. This data was then loaded into SAP PM with the correct hierarchy.

With the properly functioning CMMS and new centralized team, the client reduced its reserve equipment, freeing-up $5mm+ per year in expenditures.