In 2018, Miele made the decision: In the future, mobile processes were to be established in maintenance. Most of the plants of the traditional German company use the SAP module EAM for maintenance. The associated processes are manually controlled and information runs on paper. The extensive search for a system that could meaningfully supplement SAP EAM with digital processes resulted in the decision for OPRA at the beginning of 2018. Since the beginning of 2019, the SAP-based application of DATAGROUP for the maintenance of mobile and stationary systems and devices has been available for all Miele plants. Via process-oriented user interfaces, the application provides comprehensive and context-related information at the touch of a button on any mobile device. OPRA is fully integrated into SAP and enhances the EAM module with a user-friendly process design

SAP add-on with coherent user guidance

Oliver Braun from the “Smart Maintenance” department at Miele & Cie. KG has been working in the appliance manufacturing plant at the Gütersloh site for 33 years. “In a detailed comparison with competitor products, we particularly liked OPRA’s embedding in SAP without interfaces and the very coherent user guidance. The licence model in connection with SAP was also interesting. Overall, DATAGROUP offered the most economical alternative,” he explains the product decision.

DATAGROUP uses the Fiori Client SAP for its maintenance solution and thus picks up the concept of the new SAP user interfaces in its software – another plus point for Miele. Fiori runs on any browser, on the PC as well as on the tablet or smartphone. The maintenance software also accesses SAP directly, without interfaces or middleware in between.

All information bundled at the place of value creation

The practical use of OPRA at Miele started at the German sites in Gütersloh, Bielefeld and Oelde; the international plants are to be added step by step in the short to medium term. The laundry care competence centre is located in Gütersloh. Dishwashers and hoovers are manufactured in Bielefeld, cookers and ovens in Oelde. In Gütersloh alone, some 5,250 people work for Miele. The production facilities in these plants are now maintained with OPRA, as is the technical building equipment. Using the OPRA apps on their mobile devices, the maintenance staff can filter out their jobs themselves and directly book back the working time spent.

This reduces the administrative workload enormously. In OPRA, operating instructions and all other documents for the relevant component are stored behind each order and can be displayed. “At the point of value creation, everyone has all the information they need,” says Oliver Braun. When inspecting a lift truck, for example, no one has to fill out a piece of paper with the master data, scan it and save it in SAP. The individual points of a checklist are ticked off directly on the mobile device, and at the end OPRA automatically generates an inspection report as a PDF and stores it in Miele’s document management system.

Standardised processes for “Production” and Cross Plant Services

Cross Plant Services is a separate department with its own maintenance team. This team also works with the new solution in the entire range of possible applications: be it in the forklift workshop, for the maintenance of dock levellers, for safety checks of fire doors, repairs of sanitary facilities and much more. In the final stage of expansion, 400 mobile devices are to be distributed at Miele with the OPRA client, at all – also – foreign locations that currently work with SAP. Smaller plants without SAP will follow. In addition, Miele wants to integrate its production workers, who are traditionally involved in the maintenance process, via OPRA as well.

In the meantime, the software release 2.2.2 has been successfully introduced in close cooperation. Many individual wishes on the part of Miele have been incorporated into the upgrade to the new release.