My company does not use SAP, can I still use AsInt Mechanical Integrity Apps?

My company is using an older version of SAP, can I still use AsInt Mechanical Integrity Apps?

My company has not completed the SAP s4Hana migration, how can I access the AsInt Mechanical Integrity Apps?

My company uses SAP as a financial system, not to manage and process critical Asset Integrity Data. How does this differ?

SAP is too costly, isn’t it better just to buy a standalone solution?

What database engines are supported?

SAP is not the most user friendly, my inspection department would never access it to perform Mechanical Integrity Work. How will this work?

My company just went through a big upgrade and we don’t have time or budget to move to the next version of SAP. How does this work?

Yes! The SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) Suite and AsInt Apps can run independently in the cloud without a backend SAP On-Premise Asset and Work Management solution.

In this case, the asset registry and data generated will exist in the SAP IAM, and not in the On-Premise solution.

Two options exist here.

1. Use the AsInt production environment, which is based on the SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite.

2. License your own SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) Suite and “subscribe” to the AsInt Apps. See this article for an idea on the costing of this option, or visit the SAP App Store for additional pricing information.

Yes, your organization does not have to be in the latest s4Hana on-premise solution. You can also be running ECC6.0 and use the SAP Cloud Connector to communicate to the SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite. See below System Requirements on what older versions of SAP are supported. A more detailed document can be found here.

No worries. AsInt manages our own production SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite with our AsInt Mechanical Integrity Apps. While your organization is readying your s4Hana system, organizations can use the AsInt production environment.

If your organization is using SAP as a financial system only, it is more than likely you have assets and locations in the system along with the work management solution (Work Orders and Notifications).

A few things will change, for the better, once the SAP solution is extended to address Asset and Mechanical Integrity needs. They include:

1. Additional Equipment and Location templates to address the data management (diameter, materials, process conditions, etc..) for Asset and Mechanical Integrity drivers.

2. Additional assets will be added to the financial systems. For example, the Pipe is usually addressed at a System level. Now, there is an option to create a richer set of equipment taxonomy. It is important to note, this is not mandatory. The Equipment could reside in the SAP Cloud Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite only.

3. Greater levels of detailed data will be available to the SAP Planners. This includes historical inspections, risk assessments driving the work, threshold information, and key critical equipment variables such as operating conditions.

Believe it or not, the SAP Cloud Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite is a very affordable annual cost per equipment (SAP refers to them as devices to be more generic). In fact, AsInt has studied the annual SAP IAM costs, compared to competitors on the market, and the IAM solution is generally half the cost!

For example, an owner/user can purchase the solution for 10,000 pieces of equipment for as low as 10,000 USD a year! This is a high resilience production instance with lots of functionality to address asset integrity.

Additionally, it is a scalable platform that can be added too with global internationalization and localization capabilities (multi-lingual, unit of measures, etc..).

For additional information in pricing, follow this link.

Good news…you don’t have to worry about setting up a SQL Server or Oracle instance anymore! When using the SAP IAM solution, it is utilizing the SAP Hana database to store data in the background. This costs, as well as the SAP IAM suite applications, are bundled together in a low annual cost.

Reporting and Data Import utilities are provided as part of the solution stack, so no need to connect or manipulate this information with 3rd party or in-house developed utilities.

Headache and costs removed!

The User Experience has dramatically improved with the new SAP Cloud Based Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) Suite. It’s not the SAP user experience your mom and dad grew up with!

SAP has recognized the need to develop a modern User Interface and User Experience to 1) address the new generation workforce coming online, and 2) address “responsive browsing” which allows the end user to interact with the applications on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. This new User Experience is called Fiori. For additional information in the User Experience and to find out more on Fiori, follow this link.

Additionally, Roles can be setup to ensure the Inspector or Reliability engineer only see the Fiori tiles that are applicable to them.

More good news! SAP has solved the effort and costs of implementing new versions of SAP by moving to the cloud!

What does this mean? For the SAP Intelligent Asset Management (IAM) suite that lives in the cloud, it gets upgraded every quarter. This ensures everyone is always on the latest release, no longer will organization be years out of date.

Connecting the SAP IAM suite to your on-premise SAP Plant Maintenance is a matter of days, performed by your internal IT teams. For further reading on how the SAP IAM connects to the On-Premise solution, click here.