Mobile Maintenance for Power Plants:Award-Winning Solution of Evonik Interfaces to SAP as well

• Maintenance and Equipment Isolation with RFID

Since a few years Evonik power plants use mobile devices and RFID-chips that are attached to the individual equipment units to support maintenance and deactivation/reactivation activities directly on site. In March 2009 this solution has been awarded the prize „Maintainer 2009“ in the category „project of the year: service provider“ by the consulting company T. A. Cook in collaboration with BASF, BP, Hydro Aluminium and Infracor.

As current enhancement the solution for mobile maintenance now also interfaces directly to SAP without use of the xMAM module. This system structure gives the universally applicable standard solution a high investment security.

The integral solution of Evonik Energy Services GmbH provides mobile support for maintenance, service, deactivation/ reactivation, meter readings and round tours directly at the plant equipment and is interfaced to the SAP-system. The reduction of the number of interfaces pays back by needing less time for installation and commissioning of this standard solution and for later system support.

In the past the support of work tasks often ended in the supervisor’s office. With help of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) the computerized maintenance system now extends to the equipment in the plant. A RFID-Chip attached to the equipment is used to uniquely identify the individual equipment on site and automatically displays the work tasks at hand. Important information related to the maintenance and deactivation activities are recorded on the RFID-chip.

On the occasion of the “MainDays” congress the mobile solution of Evonik Energy Services GmbH has been awarded the prize “Maintain 2009”. A jury with notable members recognized the advantages of the system that simplify the work at the technical equipment and improve the work safety at the same time.

As autonomous frontend-system the mobile component of Evonik can be couple to any backend-system. A direct interface to SAP (for which the use of the native SAPxMAM-solution has been omitted) results in short time for commissioning, gives convincing performance during synchronization and for the user interface and requires only a small amount of customization of SAP. In addition the support costs for continuous operation are kept low.

If a customer doesn’t use any maintenance system Evonik can supply SI® as backend-system together with the mobile component which in this combination covers all needs of maintenance and technical plant operation and is supplied from one source.