As a branch of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), EAM software offers buyers management capabilities to maintain physical assets. It allows you to plan, optimize, execute and track crucial maintenance operations. Many EAM software offer great features, making it difficult for users to choose between them. In this article, we’ll compare two popular EAM systems — SAP and Maximo by IBM.
While our research finds IBM to have the edge over SAP, keep reading to learn how these two fare against each other in terms of individual features.
What This Article Covers
Features Comparison
IBM Maximo Asset Management is a comprehensive core module that supports regular asset monitoring throughout your enterprise. It allows you to classify items/assets using conditional expressions in the asset template and define sequences, class, identity and other features. The solution also helps you manage material allocation through preventive maintenance triggers and track status updates on inventory, work orders and more.
SAP EAM has a robust materials management module consisting of enterprise structure definition and assignments, purchasing, valuation, and account assignment. The solution helps enhance the visibility of materials across plants and enables part reservations for needed materials. It also lets you classify inventory with SAP standard descriptions for serial numbers, tagging and more.
While we know IBM Maximo has proved its mettle against SAP EAM, let’s compare SAP vs. Maximo features in detail to understand their strengths and weaknesses better.
Asset Life Cycle Management
IBM Maximo Asset Management provides 360-degree asset life cycle management. It provides a centralized information system to track asset movements, failures and performance across your enterprise. This feature allows you to develop preventive maintenance programs, increase asset uptime and reduce unplanned maintenance.
This asset management solution also helps optimize maintenance across types of vehicle assets, including cars, trucks and buses. The solution provides critical insights into important vehicle data such as:
- Maintenance schedules
- Driver logs
- Fuel management
- Vehicle status
- Meter history
- Warrant recovery
It helps users optimize vehicle life through preventive maintenance.
SAP EAM provides powerful asset life cycle management with a broad spectrum of features for business processes. The solution provides a holistic view of performance, risk and costs throughout the asset life cycle with information related to the usage of assets, accounting costs, warranties and other processes. It helps increase asset ROI and enables informed purchase decisions.
This includes robust support for vehicle maintenance through alignment with the HPC America fleet management template. The solution supports fleet and individual vehicle maintenance by assigning VMRS codes and has features such as history, reference products, vehicle attachments and warranties on a single dashboard. It also allows you to manage fuel consumption and schedule preventive maintenance.
Winner: Both EAM platforms offer excellent asset management functionality and tie for this feature.
Work Orders
IBM Maximo is a cloud-based system that combines asset and maintenance management in one mobile-ready platform. You can manage and monitor all work orders and transaction life cycles.
IBM’s asset management system Maximo provides robust work order functionality. The solution allows you to create, modify, print and track work orders and build hierarchies. The solution also automates work order requests through resource planning and material availability.
It also allows you to schedule preventive maintenance for asset groups across locations, manage inspections through the intuitive Maximo user interface and manage push notifications anywhere.
IBM Maximo’s work order management feature lets users track the scheduled and performed work orders of their assets. Source
You can apply customer agreements and price schedules directly to the work orders associated with them. They can view cost and price information, including referenced pricing agreement, included pricing and minimum pricing, in the view costs and prices window.
You can view a list of all open or billed order batches for a work order in the view customer billing history window. The Maximo EAM allows you to review details about the bill batch, customer agreement, copy status, prices and costs.
SAP Enterprise Asset Management works with assets throughout their entire life cycle. At the start, you can quickly enter assets into the program database and track all asset performance in real time. For maintenance, you can set up preventive maintenance schedules to keep assets in top shape before they become suspect to damage.
SAP EAM provides excellent work order management module. The solution allows work order creation and helps users view and allocate resources filtered by equipment availability.
The solution integrates with SAP HANA in-memory technology to analyze various asset data using machine learning algorithms. Then it issues preventive maintenance triggers through notifications and alerts before a part fails. This helps you create inspection lists and prevent unplanned downtime.
Winner: SAP offers superior work order functionality as it not only allows for work order management features but automates and assists in their completion wherever possible.
Inventory Management
IBM Maximo is a modular approach to enterprise asset management that centralizes predictive maintenance and reliability processes. By consolidating data from different sources, you can gain real-time visibility into the health of your assets.
IBM Maximo Asset Management provides master vendor information on supply prices, contracts, lead time and more, ensuring inventory availability at multiple locations. It allows you to place blanket orders, provide safety and update re-order stock points. The solution also automates purchase requisitions for required parts of inventory.
IBM Maximo’s inventory management feature allows users to maintain physical counts and manage storerooms. Source
SAP utilizes an asset-centric model that gives users and managers easier access to the equipment’s most critical information, leading to better financial and operational decision-making.
SAP EAM provides excellent inventory management functionality through an add-on inventory management module. The solution offers tag-and-capture assets, access to master data, and other real-time integrations. You can leverage features like inventory visualization, stock availability across multiple sites and direct lookup for specific assets.
Winner: Maximo beats SAP in this category with its all-in-one inclusivity and automation features.
Maintenance Management
IBM Maximo Asset Management allows you to create workflows and manage asset performance throughout their life cycles. It ensures regulatory compliance and lets you create custom report generation templates. The solution helps you schedule maintenance activities and provides reports on shutdowns, outages and turnarounds, improving response times to faults to increase operational efficiency.
SAP EAM provides robust maintenance management functionality. The solution consists of asset management and work order management tools and ensures regulatory compliance. It helps keep assets at their peak performance by implementing timelier maintenance and shorter response times.
SAP’s maintenance management module allows users to schedule and track maintenance activities. Source
The solution also allows you to create work-process templates through Work Clearance Management integration and create a fault tree list against a part or equipment in the asset master list.
Winner: These two solutions tie for solid maintenance management features.
Integrations
IBM Maximo empowers business operators by fully integrating with IoT and the Watson IoT platform. This means that the solution can capture data from key sources like people, sensors and devices for comprehensive real-time visibility into users’ performances and health.
IBM Maximo Asset Management can support APIs and provide Maximo Mobile Asset Manager for mobile integration. Maximo lets you create and modify workflows using the Maximo Workflow Designer application and enables notifications required at different levels.
With real-time analytics tools that tap into the Internet of Things (IoT), SAP EAM allows you to improve the health of your assets, increase collaboration and dramatically accelerate performance with integrated enterprise asset management. You can utilize this direct connectivity with the IoT to adopt a usage-based business model and monitor remote assets anywhere.
SAP EAM provides integration with mobile devices for plant maintenance work orders and supports data import and export functionality. The solution lets you create workflow and business automation requests to allow quick insight into work processes and audit trails.
Winner: SAP wins for integration in user reviews and the number of platforms it can integrate with.
Reporting
IBM Maximo Asset Management provides useful reporting and BI features. The solution offers reporting and auditing capabilities for over 150 types of reports, allowing you to visualize and analyze a vast amount of data, take preventive actions and track changes to asset attributes.
The solution enables KPI creation within the KPI template and manager application. It also enables you to color-code and highlight KPIs for additional data analysis. Maximo also provides reporting tools to track asset faults based on predefined failure metrics.
With SAP, you can generate trend analysis and fault tree analysis reports. It provides statistical tools for asset modeling, data discovery, asset scoring and visualization. SAP allows you to create and download activity reports for an asset’s service and maintenance history and enables the creation of solid KPI metrics.
Winner: Both systems have functional business analytics reporting capabilities.
Preventive Maintenance
IBM Maximo has a robust preventive maintenance application that allows you to plan and schedule maintenance for work assets and locations. You can create templates, assign job plans to PM templates, specify a schedule for an asset or location, and select a time to generate work orders from templates chosen automatically.
It also allows you to access real-time condition data using the IBM Maximo Asset Health Insight Solution and create preventive maintenance hierarchies to schedule multiple or group work orders.
SAP EAM offers preventive maintenance with the integration of the Asset Central Foundation. It enables you to create maintenance strategies, maintain task lists and operations, and check equipment reliability.
SAP EAM helps track all preventive maintenance activities.
This module reduces asset breakdown and machine downtime by suggesting maintenance recommendations based on reliability-centered maintenance and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) assessments.
It also provides SAP Predictive Maintenance and Services, including algorithms, machine learning functions and abstract layers. It helps with anomaly detection, distance-based failure analysis, remaining useful life prediction and failure prediction.
Winner: SAP EAM offers superior functionality with reliability-centered maintenance and FMEA functions and predictive maintenance services, like machine learning.
Predictive Maintenance
IBM Maximo enables you to manage future asset failure and identify failure factors impacting your organization. It collects data from IoT sensors and EAM and ERP systems and uses Watson Machine Learning to look for patterns in the environment, usage and other asset data.
It then correlates this data with any potential issues responsible for future failures. It also includes predictive model templates and a library of analytics APIs to customize model templates and associated visualizations.
SAP EAM has two different modules, SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service and SAP Predictive Engineering Insight.
Predictive Maintenance and Service uses sensor data to plan maintenance schedules and predict equipment malfunction. You can view current asset health and analyze big data to predict future needs. It offers a central control center to manage asset data collected via sensors, machines and third-party systems. It includes machine learning that helps take preventive actions using statistical methods.
SAP HANA produces analytics through big data computing. You can analyze trends, calculate performance against KPIs, and track consumption profiles.
SAP EAM helps track all preventive maintenance activities. Source
SAP Predictive Engineering Insights allows you to access real-time asset performance data in operation, reduce operational costs and predict future failures using historical failures and machine learning algorithms. It includes vibration analysis capabilities and the SAP Leonardo Digital Innovation PDMS system.
Winner: SAP beats IBM Maximo in this section, as SAP offers two different modules of predictive maintenance that help predict future failures and improve the production of highly critical assets.
Environment, Health and Safety Management
IBM Maximo has excellent environmental, health and safety management features. It offers regulatory compliance, asset specification and failure codes, action tracking, and survey and audit preparation and analysis. You can specify required certifications for assets and personnel, investigate the root cause of failures, define lockout and tag operations, and create ticket templates.
It includes bypass management, incident management, production run reporting, matrix-based prioritization of work, planning and operator logs. It enables integration with MIMOSA OSA-EAI V3.2.1-based systems.
Maximo’s HSE includes self-service functionality to address health and safety concerns in a facility. Source
SAP Environment, Health and Safety Management app helps you reduce risk exposure in the field. It uses a standardized process to track and investigate incidents, manage chemicals, air and water emissions, monitor hygiene, track employee health, and calculate emissions. You can use EHS risk assessment to conduct real-time analysis, detect deviations, assign legal requirements, and integrate risk-based occupational safety and health processes with a central HR database.
Winner: IBM Maximo wins in this section as it offers exceptional features like lockout and tag and ticket template creation.
Mobile Support
IBM Maximo has a suite of Android and iOS applications called Maximo Anywhere made on the IBM MobileFirst Platform framework to help integrate with work management system providers. It connects mobile apps and enterprise systems to offer smooth run time and access the functionality online and offline. You can manage work orders, access data and check availability in the inventory.
You can use Maximo Mobile Inventory to gain remote access to handle inventory management processes. Access receipts of purchase orders and maintain physical counts, return of items, transfers, and storeroom issues.
Maintain control of your EAM needs from anywhere using the Maximo Anywhere app. Source
SAP EAM offers SAP Asset Manager, SAP Work Manager and SAP Inventory Management mobile applications on iOS and Android. Applications can be accessed online and offline, except for SAP Inventory Management. SAP Asset Management helps you:
- Manage data
- Access visualizations
- Record work status and progress
- Report potential issues
- View history and asset information
- Generate reports
- Track labor
- Search for assets in location maps
SAP’s work manager enables you to access:
- Asset readings
- Work data
- Receipts
- Equipment taggings
- Maintenance history
- Photos
- Measurements
It also offers augmented reality features to enlist virtual help from experts and a real-time view of situations.
SAP Inventory Management provides tools to track and manage stockrooms, customer orders, inventory levels and the movement of materials. ERP has a few add-on features to record physical inventory counts and manage material receipts and distribution based on purchase orders.
Winner: These two solutions tie for their solid mobile support.
The Final Verdict
IBM Maximo is a comprehensive management solution, while SAP is more of an analytics software. Maximo has features such as procurement/materials management, work management and contract management, which help you take control of your parts inventory, vendor contracts and work orders.
On the other hand, SAP uses machine learning and various operational analytics to create sophisticated data models on your equipment’s performance data.
Businesses that want to centralize their asset management business processes tend to gravitate towards Maximo, while those who want deep performance analysis prefer SAP. Our research found IBM Maximo had the advantage over SAP.
But ultimately, the verdict on SAP vs. Maximo is specific to your needs and current business processes, so consider using this comparison as a starting point for evaluating EAM vendors. For a more in-depth look, get a free copy of our comparison report.
Which of the two is best for your business and why? Let us know in the comments!
Top Competitors
