Mark Pyatt is Global Marketing Director for SAP Mill Products & Mining. In this capacity, he's worked on a number of ways to articulate the performance of the SAP solution within specific end-to-end business processes. Through this, he's been integral to the positioning of certain SAP value scenarios. One such example focuses on ways to address typical sources of frustration within asset visibility in the mining industry.
Asset Visibility and Performance centers on the SAP delivery of dashboards for the mining industry, to provide a single view of real-time plant, equipment, and process information for asset managers.
Recently, Mark took time out to summarize the scenario and its applications in a podcast created for an internal SAP audience (mainly for Field executives). However, he's also helped us to create a version of the podcast suitable for the BPX community. You can find a link to the recording below, together with a transcript of the conversation.
Transcript
Kieran: Mark, can you first outline the customer need and pain point addressed in the
central scenario?
Mark: The scenario addresses asset visibility and performance for Mining and Mill
Products industries. Our customers need a solution to help them gain better visibility to operations, whether it is in mining or at a plant. Having visibility to multiple enterprise assets is critical and many of our customers don’t have the ability to do this right now. They don’t have the real-time visibility they need; so they can’t analyze production, respond to equipment or process failures or know what the status of inventory is at a given point in time. They have disparate software solutions, supported by manual processes that are not integrated, so their visibility is limited - and most have to operate from knowledge and experience of people who “know” the business, not actual data. As you can imagine, this leads to great inefficiencies and higher costs to run the business.
Kieran: What's the SAP solution and where is the value add?
Mark: The SAP solution is a value scenario in the High Performing Assets theme portfolio, called Asset Visibility and Performance for Mill Products and Mining……it is broken into 3 areas, including: 1) Set-up Plant Dashboards and Act on Alerts, 2) Conduct Improvement Programs, 3) Optimize Maintenance and Site Operations. The value add is that this solution enables a common set of KPIs to be shared across the corporation to track operational performance improvement; the difference is that all levels of management from the top executive to the line worker in the plant can access and share the same data, monitoring their performance to improve overall operations. The visibility dashboards are pre-configured for different organizational roles and are also integrated with operations, so customers choose what KPIs / information is important to them and then align on common metrics to drive improvement. The dashboards are multi-dimensional, meaning they can be divided into several different views, as well as show multiple locations simultaneously to provide visibility where needed. SAP enables adaptive business processes by synchronizing Mill or Mining operations with enterprise business systems to deliver “a single version of the truth” … enabling the enterprise to truly work towards operational excellence.
Kieran: What's the competition in this space? How is our solution better?
Mark: SAP’s solution in this area is better because we provide 1) A single layer of pre-built connectivity to multiple mill or mining applications to quickly integrate real-time operations and enterprise business processes at lower total cost of ownership (TCO), 2) We provide a unified, real-time analytics and decision support solution for production personnel to access, enabling them to monitor, measure, analyze and control KPI’s, for higher productivity and performance, 3) We provide a “platform” with predefined building blocks and templates to build integrated and innovative operational applications - fast, flexible and tailored to the business and operational needs of the customer.
Kieran: Can you give a rough estimate of implementation time and cost?
Mark: This varies, depending on what the customer determines is their highest business priority. For customers who need to develop a plan or overall roadmap, SAP Value Engineering Consulting can work with them to conduct an assessment to build a plan, timeline and implementation schedule to meet their needs, if they don’t have an idea on how to get started……this also identifies the total costs and time required for Return on Investment, and provides customers with a business case in which they can choose different solution options to meet their needs........ this approach has been used successfully in the past and helps customers optimize their spend to address key needs they have for implementing an asset visibility and performance solution for their enterprise.
Kieran: Mark, thanks for putting all this in context.
Mark: My pleasure. If anyone has a question, please have them contact me at mark.pyatt@sap.com.
