Definition

The business object "Equipment" is an individual, physical object that is to be maintained independently. It can be installed in a technical system or part of a technical system.

You can manage all types of device as pieces of equipment (for example, production utilities, transportation utilities, test equipment, production resources/tools, buildings, PCs).

Since many of these physical objects are managed as "assets" in Asset Management, the term "piece of equipment" was chosen for objects defined from a technical perspective, in order to avoid confusion with the activated tangible assets.

You define and manage each piece of equipment in the Plant Maintenance (PM) System in a separate master record and can set up an individual maintenance history for each one.

Structure

The system manages the master records for pieces of equipment at client level. This means that their numbers are valid for the entire corporate group.

The equipment master record contains several types of data:

This is fixed data, which generally does not change in the course of time, for example, the acquisition value of the piece of equipment, its size and dimensions and the year of construction.

This is time-dependent data. It can change repeatedly in the course of time. This data can be, for example, the maintenance planner group, the responsible work center, the maintenance plant and the cost center.

Time-dependent data allows you to look at a piece of equipment dynamically, in other words over the course of time. If your system is set up accordingly with the help of the Customizing functions, it automatically creates a new time segment for specific master record changes that describes the equipment usage period.

This is data that you specify when you want to manage your pieces of equipment not only as individual objects, but also from an inventory management perspective. This data comprises material data as well as stock and customer information.

See Serialization Data in the Piece of Equipment .

This is data that describes which individual components of a standard product make up the piece of equipment.

This is data that describes a certain responsibility for a piece of equipment, such as for example, supplier, purchaser, responsible employee.

See Partners in PM/CS Processing .

The following functions are also available:

You can classify pieces of equipment by their technical characteristics using the SAP Classification System. The classes help you to find similar or identical pieces of equipment in the system more easily.

You can define an address for each piece of equipment. This could be, for example, the address of a company that is responsible for the maintenance of a service equipment, or an internal consultant.

Using ABAP reports, you can evaluate the master records data for pieces of equipment, according to different criteria.