After attending a show dominated by plant maintenance folks (EAM), I learned that it might be time to talk a little bit about the differences and similarities between the two different modules. Those familair with PM or SM within SAP probably recognize that there are many transactions that overlap between the two areas. In fact, as far as the technical tables are concerned, there is no difference between a service order or a maintenance order.
The best way I came up with to describe SM to the PM audience was the customer. In SM, the customer is outside of your organization, in PM the customer is internal to your organization. Of course, there is additional overhead when you deal with “external” customers. You need to be concerned with sales orders, deliveries to and from the customer, etc. But at the end of the day, a service order and a maintenance order are nearly identical.
In addition, EAM has quite a unique flavor that I don’t often see in the service world. It’s the addition of functional locations. In the service world, I’m more familiar with using the installed base, or nothing at all. This leads to even more master data, and more master data maintenance to keep everything in sync.
The other thing that in the maintenance world it “can” be a more planned approach. In the service world, it is typically more unplanned work. This means that the maintenance world can care a lot more about scheduling and optimization. Not that service wouldn’t want to do the same thing, but it’s much harder to predict how your customers will use their equipment. PM needs to focus a lot more scheduling, resource scheduling, component scheduling. This pieces are still important for service, but are much less under the control of the business.
So, while there is solid cross over pieces, there are quite a few differences between PM and SM.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike