However, many industrial maintenance and operations managers struggle to effectively manage their assets and teams, because the tooling is too complex, making it challenging to work efficiently and productively.
Optimizing the maintenance of critical assets in a cost effective and agile way is a complex proposition. This involves orchestrating people, parts, and resources in a streamlined way while ensuring compliance and safety risks are proactively addressed.
SAP offers a comprehensive suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities, it can nevertheless lack the versatility and wide-ranging asset management features today’s industrial firms need to optimize their maintenance and reliability operations. Furthermore, the intricate nature of SAP can slow down complex cross-disciplinary processes and information flows. This creates issues when it comes to effective planning, resource coordination, performance reporting, and confident decision making.
The good news is that by integrating IFS Ultimo's SAP S4/HANA certified EAM solution into their SAP environments, operations and maintenance managers can address four key challenges.
Challenge 1: Improve uptime and cost control
With siloed, complex systems, it’s hard to identify what needs urgent attention. Navigating multiple systems to access data, check asset health, and track maintenance progress takes time—limiting the ability to act quickly and prevent costly breakdowns or downtime. On average, downtime costs exceed $1M per hour, adding significant financial risk.
Inefficient maintenance quickly drives up costs, while unexpected downtime disrupts production schedules—leading to quality issues, shipment delays, and reduced profit margins. Without clear maintenance tracking, optimizing operations becomes a guessing game.
Intuitive and easy-to-use, IFS Ultimo's EAM solution features specialized tools for work order tracking, scheduling and preventative maintenance. These tools can all be easily integrated with SAP because Ultimo is a fully SAP S4/HANA certified solution. Alongside streamlining processes and enhancing cross-team collaboration, maintenance and operations managers gain the actionable insights they need to manage cost, risk, and performance in a holistic way:
Real-time insights into asset health and performance – enabling proactive maintenance and downtime reduction
Simplified workflows – realizing more hands-on-tool-time and reducing time spent on admin, improving productivity and streamlining processes to promote consistency and efficiency
Optimized maintenance – clear tracking and confident decision-making, with dedicated reporting tools for all maintenance activities.
True EAM systems also play an important role in mitigating safety risks. When maintenance teams are consumed with just keeping machines running - without asset insight - it becomes a gargantuan task to stay safe and compliant while meeting production quota.
Challenge 2: Eliminate maintenance technician pain points
Complex siloed systems can prove highly challenging for managers and frontline workers to navigate and use. Because of this, undertaking day-to-day tasks proves time consuming and frustrating for users across the organization.
With Ultimo, all key data is consolidated into a single straightforward solution that enables managers to quickly access the right data and insights they need. Even better, the intuitive interface is fully customizable for every user’s needs. There’s no need for people to engage in convoluted workarounds, as workflows can be optimized to meet the specific needs of engineering teams:
An intuitive and easy-to-use interface – designed specifically for the needs of maintenance professionals. Review planned maintenance tasks, get up to speed on current issues, undertake and document machine inspections, work in full alignment with reliability, safety and production teams
All key data on one location– accessible and easily configurable with just a few clicks
Adaptive and flexible – streamline work order management and connect individual users with assets and tasks fast
Challenge 3: Future-proofed scalability
Rigid, complex systems are hard to adapt and require costly expertise to customize. Managing changes, like adding new assets, involves expensive updates that disrupt workflows and reduce Hands-On Tool Time (HOTT). With an average HOTT of 35%—far below the ideal 55%—productivity suffers. Increasing HOTT to 55% can boost productivity by 57%, allowing 40 people to do the work of 63. Efficient, on-the-spot changes save time, cut costs, and keep workflows running smoothly. Built for growth, Ultimo is designed to scale with your business and support you as you progress on your EAM maturity journey:
Initiate proactive maintenance – use data analytics to identify emerging failures and risks
Full integration with SAP ERP – streamline your maintenance, procurement, stock and purchase and financial processes, and achieve your strategic asset management goals
Automate data collection – make it easier for maintenance staff to submit reports and get the data insights that empower their actions
Scalability – accommodate expanding asset portfolios with ease.
Challenge 4: Enable and optimize a connected workforce
With Ultimo, maintenance and production managers gain full visibility of the asset lifecycle – everything from real-time data on asset status, performance and maintenance needs, through to usage patterns and long-term asset investment recommendations. Even more importantly, it empowers managers and field teams by providing mobile access to critical asset information. Whether that’s an inspection checklist, maintenance history or real-time updates, Ultimo allows maintenance staff to benefit from:
A rich choice of digital tools – asset information is easily accessible and available to all, thanks to a unified database that supports the effective execution of maintenance plans
Mobile empowerment – plan, track and manage maintenance directly from any device. Stay connected and in control, no matter where you are
The productive connected workforce – easy access to operational data that further empowers engineering teams. Reduced time spent on admin, and increased time spent on tasks that add significant value to the asset lifecycle. Critical information where it will make the biggest impact.
SAP and Ultimo: Better Together
Organizations that use Ultimo to complement their SAP ERP environment find it fast and easy to unlock the full potential of their assets and reimagine the value EAM adds to their business.
By delivering real-time visibility of the maintenance workload, Ultimo enables maintenance and operations managers to plan, schedule and execute time-sensitive maintenance activities more efficiently and effectively. But that’s not all.
Streamlined asset management processes ensure that planned and unplanned maintenance tasks can be handled in a standardized way. Meanwhile, technicians can detect, report and resolve failures and undertake corrective actions in a timely manner. Even better, it eliminates the information silos that prevent different departments from working cohesively together. The time spent on admin is reduced, while the time spent on high value-add tasks is increased.
Industrial operations and maintenance managers who want to take their maintenance and engineering management to the next level are enabled to stay focused on what really matters – keeping operations running smoothly and efficiently. IFS Ultimo’s versatile EAM solution is the ideal complement to their SAP environment.
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IFS Ultimo helps manufacturing CIOs bridge the gap between ERP and advanced asset management. See it in action!
