Basic Principles of Preventive Maintenance in SAP S/4HANA

Preventive maintenance always involves effort, both in its planning and execution.

Never­theless, there are many reasons why you must or should perform preventive maintenance in your company, including the following:

• Legal requirements: Legislation on plant safety or industrial health and safety may require you to inspect or maintain your technical system regularly.
• Quality assurance: The quality of a product depends largely on the condition of the production facility in which it is manufactured.
• Fewer malfunctions: One of the most important tasks in maintenance planning is to keep a production facility continuously available over the long term. Effective preventive maintenance helps ensure that a technical system does not fail and reduces unnecessary costs arising from repairs, system replacements, or production downtimes.
• Environmental protection requirements: Effective preventive maintenance can help prevent system breakdowns that lead to envi­ronmental impacts.
• Manufacturer recommendations: Your technical system’s manufacturer may recommend certain procedures to ensure that the system always runs optimally.
• Improved capacity utilization: Preventive maintenance provides a work list that helps you use your workshops more consistently, for example, because you have fewer breakdown-related repair tasks to handle.
• Lower maintenance costs: Whether preventative maintenance can decrease your maintenance costs is debatable and depends largely on whether you’ve already reached the optimum intensity of pre­ventive maintenance.

Whether you're using SAP S/4HANA or another logistics system, preventive maintenance and repair costs are inversely proportional and depend on the intensity of preventive maintenance (see figure below), as follows:

• The higher the intensity level of preventive maintenance, the higher the preventive main­tenance costs.
• The higher the intensity level of preventive maintenance, the lower the costs for repairs.

At the optimum intensity level, W0, the overall costs of plant maintenance are minimal. Follow-up costs that may arise from inadequate preventive maintenance (for example, re­starting costs) are not included in this cost consideration, since they are considered oppor­tunity costs only.

There are three different types of preventive maintenance (see next figure), as follows:

• Time-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered after a certain period of time has expired (for example, every six months).
• Performance-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered when a certain performance threshold is reached (for example, every 10,000 miles).
• Condition-based maintenance: The preventive maintenance task is triggered when a certain diagnostic value has not been reached or has been exceeded (for example, a pressure lower than 15 bar or tem­perature higher than 85°C).

Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Plant Maintenance with SAP S/4HANA: Business User Guide by Karl Liebstückel and Markus Seidl. Prof. Dr. Liebstückel was a professor of information management and business software at the Technical University Würzburg-Schweinfurt in Germany, and he has approximately 40 years of experience in the field of enterprise asset management. Markus is a chief solution architect at SAP with more than 25 years of experience in the field of enterprise asset management.

This post was originally published 9/2026.