Service and asset maintenance (also known as EAM or CMMS) refers to the management and monitoring of the assets of an organisation to ensure optimal performance and to avoid losses due to breakdowns. These assets include the plant, equipment and available facilities. SAM supports the management of the assets across departments, locations, facilities, and in some cases, business units. Managing assets across the enterprise can improve asset utilisation, reduce capital costs, reduce asset-related operating costs, and subsequently improve ROA (return on assets).

Dynamics Ax SAM                                                                             

The core of Dynamics Ax SAM was developed by Thy:data in Denmark. Thy:data has also developed the shop floor control (SFC) module for Dynamics Ax. Dynamics Ax SAM is integrated with Dynamics Ax production and shop floor control, which enables time registrations via shop floor control. Furthermore, time registrations on work orders can be used to generate pay.
In addition, Dynamics Ax SAM is also integrated with the rest of Ax. When planning preventative maintenance, the production plan is automatically taken into consideration. Stopped production, which is caused by maintenance issues, is entered as such in the production plan for the affected machines. This enables preventative maintenance, as it is possible to run through the future production plan and calculate when a machine should be taken out of the plan for maintenance purposes by taking into account the expected number of production hours.

PAS offers guidelines for the management of physical assets based on a 28-point requirements checklist of good practices. Typically, this is relevant to gas, electricity and water utilities; road, air and rail transport systems; public facilities; as well as process, manufacturing and natural resource industries. It is equally applicable to the public and private sectors, as well as regulated and non-regulated environments. PAS 55 is enjoying a lot of interest and is showing promise to become a de facto worldwide specification for any organisation seeking to efficiently and professionally manage the whole life cycle of their physical assets. The specification or standard has two parts:

Part 1 - Specification for the optimised management of physical infrastructure assets

Part 2 - Guidelines for the application of PAS 55-1

It is also accompanied by a comprehensive competencies framework for asset managers. A number of organisations, under the leadership of the Institute of Asset Management, originally produced the standards in 2004. It has recently been revised substantially with the help of 50 participating organisations from 15 industry sectors in 10 countries. PAS 55:2008 was released in Dec 2008 along with a toolkit for self-assessment (against the specification). PAS 55:2008 is available in both English and Spanish.

Ax EAM vs. Ax CMMS

There are some who regard EAM as CMMS on steroids. Traditionally, CMMS has been dealing strictly within the confines of the work order and preventative maintenance space. The EAM definition is wider and claims a robust methodology for documenting equipment and their parts to include warranties, schematics, and computer aided design (CAD) drawings.

Ax SAM is all of the above. Dynamics SAM, for example, deals with the work order and preventative maintenance, and supports warranties, schematics, etc. Once data is entered inside Ax SAM's object (equipment and assets) sub module, it immediately becomes available to the other Ax sub modules. As a result, information can be reused, remains consistent, up-to-date, and never has to be entered again. Predefined forms and a convenient lookup function with a large reports repository complete the picture.
Thus, regardless of the label used, i.e. Dynamics EAM, Dynamics CMMS or Dynamics SAM, Ax SAM provides a complete, cost effective and impressive maintenance module inside the already powerful Dynamics Ax ERP.