The Mantua Group

Simple Black and White Asset Management, Reliability Expertise, and Maintenance Execution Perfection.

Your Reliability Model Should Talk to Your CMMS, Not Live Beside It

Here is a quiet productivity killer in reliability work: retyping. The equipment hierarchy already exists in SAP or Maximo. The failure history already exists in work orders. The bills of material already exist in master data. And yet in many organisations the reliability model is rebuilt by hand in isolation, drifting out of date the moment it is finished.

A model is only as alive as its data pipeline. A static model answers last year’s question. A connected model answers this morning’s question: what did the latest six months of work orders do to our failure estimates, and should the strategy change? The difference between the two is not analytical skill. It is whether a pipeline exists between the system of record and the analysis environment. Once it does, analysis frequency goes up, and so does credibility, because every number in the model traces directly to the CMMS.

What the Pipeline Carries

  • Functional location hierarchies, pulled directly rather than retyped, so the RCM study or availability model mirrors the plant as the CMMS knows it.
  • Work order history, the raw material for Weibull and survival analysis, arriving with the censoring structure intact rather than filtered down to failures only; see our article on suspended data for why that matters so much.
  • Bills of material and task groupings, feeding spares models and maintenance strategies without transcription errors.
  • Data quality caveats travelling with the data. CMMS records were captured for work management, not analysis. Our white papers Dealing with Data and Missing Data, Truncation, Censoring cover the discipline of honest inference from records that were never designed for it.

How the Tools Help You Discover the Benefit

Availability Workbench imports from Excel, Access and XML with table matching that maps your columns to application tables, and connects to the major maintenance systems through the dedicated SAP Portal and Maximo Portal. For bespoke pipelines, the AWB API and Data Link Manager connect external systems programmatically, and complex nested hierarchies occasionally warrant some scripting in the import path. All of it is well-trodden ground.

The Mantua Group has delivered more than forty SAP-to-RCMCost integrations since 2009, and the pattern is always the same: what once required weeks of manual extraction and reconciliation happens with accuracy at the click of a button, and the analysis cadence transforms accordingly. The barrier between your maintenance system and your reliability analysis was never really technical. Once it comes down, it stays down. And with the pipeline in place, the analyst’s job shifts from data wrangling to actual engineering judgment, the distinction at the heart of the podcast episode R U a Keyboard Jockey?

Go Deeper

How can we help? Talk to us at contact@mantua.group.