Monitor, Manage Fleet Maintenance

By Kristina Gordon, Illumiti

In the SAP system, in addition to cars and trucks, the “fleet object” also allows you to manage trains, commercial vehicles, machinery, ships, and aircraft. You can also use the fleet functionality to manage containers.

You can map the vehicles as equipment master records and enter vehicle-specific additional data, which is displayed in the system. This means that you can specify data such as license plate number, load volume, consumption data, fuel-card number, engine data, and fuel type directly in the equipment master record.

In the past, fleet-relevant data could only be entered manually into the system to drive preventive- or predictive-maintenance activities, or a company would purchase a third-party service that specialized in GPS to interface with SAP.

Today, SAP offers a GPS tracking interface called Connected Fleet. Sensors are placed on the fleet object. Sensor data is captured in real time and sent to a dashboard and to the plant-maintenance system. Data such as mileage, fuel usage, speed, and wheel span may be captured. In addition, safety measurements, such as heart rate and blood-alcohol levels can be sent to monitor the driver or passengers.

While the dashboard is real time, the system can be set up to notify management if maximum speed or location are off course. This notification can be an alarm or an email.

Below is a screen shot of the data that can be manually entered or captured by Connected Fleet. Notice that on the general data tab of the equipment master, you may enter vendor or customer warranty information once a notification or work order is created. The warranty information will alert the user that a warranty exists.

In the following example, we can see where the readings for hours driven, miles driven, and fuel usage have been sent to the equipment master. This can also be entered manually. Conditions can be set to trigger maintenance plans based on measurement readings, i.e., once a vehicle hits 5,000 miles, a maintenance plan will generate a work order to have the oil changed. This can also be set up to trigger notifications per vehicle, and then add multiple vehicles to one work order and one purchase order for the service to be performed.

Calculations can be set to provide metrics such as daily consumption, as seen below.   

Fleet management provides essentially endless possibilities for tracking capabilities and managing information for any vehicle or container. EP

Kristina Gordon is SAP Principal Consultant at Illumiti, Thornhill, Ontario (illumiti.com). If you have SAP questions, send them to editors@efficientplantmag.com and we’ll forward them to Kristina.