Personal Protective Equipment management in EHS(M)

A Personal protective equipment (PPE) has following lifecycle, but I don't find an out-of-box solutions as specific to PPE at this point, not sure anything planned in SAP for future release, however we have managed with material and some custom developments,

1) Procurement

2) Inventory (WM managed serialized material for traceability)

3) Logistics movement (moving between plants)

4) Maintenance (Preventive and Inspections)

5) Ownership update (Employee - Internal and external)

6) Sustainably scrap or recycle

Thanks

Paulo

In the risk assessment functionality for EHS, the software enables the process to identify and assess the risks to personnel, and then tracks relevant controls to mitigate those risks. Some controls would be PPE. There are multiple ways that a worker can determine the necessary PPE in a given location based on the risk assessment

Hello Paulo

thank you for clarifying your challenge.

Let us "split" a little bit as your topic is "huge" / "Complex" and does have many aspects to check.

a.) If you try to purchase a "PPE" it is clear it should be a material (it should be defined as a material number)

b.) BUT know the problem (might) start. You need to select "sellers" and to do so you need to specify the "quality" of the PPE you need.

c.) as soon as you have identified the "seller" the next challenge comes up: who (which worker) needs which PPE for which purpose at which point in time?

d.) and as next (as pointed out by you): after what time it is "time" to exchange the PPE.

The decision regarding time depends on "type" of PPE; conditions under which the PPE is used etc. So the "best" you might can use is to define some "timeline" (Per location/worker etc.)

Now we have two issue to check and look at: some companies buy "PPE" to be stored on the stock. Here there is no "challenge" (the PPE is not really used; and most of the PPEs are stable). So you need an option to remove the PPE from stock and IDEALLY assign it to a "worker" and most of the worker (BUT NOT ALL) have one location to support and hopefully you know the conditions of the use of the PPE and at the end: you "estimate" the time to replace.

So your topic is a clear challenge of any chemical company. Honesty: I believe the "full" E2E process ist not supported using SAP. But most of the "important" pieces are supported. To bring them together (maybe using SAP): this is clearly an option but a challenge.

From my point of view: you can define the material and may be using some "clever" material class you define a number of characteristics (describing the "PPE" a little bit). Using this "Material" you can use an option in SAP MM to "buy" the PPE (and "Store" it somethere) from some seller.

The next part is not so easy. Here i assume you might need SAP HR (as you need a "Human" which is located (in most cases) to a "Cost center" and therefore to a "plant" / "location". And here you can define the "needs". E.g. how many "gloves" of which type you might need for one location... And then if the "glove" is used by a worker you could reduce the "stock" (and because of the asssignment to a worker you can "perform" some "estimates" like: after one year of use it is tim to exchange the "gloves". But this is only a very primitive example.

Christoph, Michael,

Thank you for your replies, but useful as they are, they do not exactly answer my question; As Christoph put it, I did not made myself clear.

One of the needs my customer posed was to have a tool to manage to whom, when and where PPE's are distributed, when they should be replaced, why where they replaced (validity dates, early wear, etc.). Preferably with the possibility to be digitaly signed by each worker/contractor/visitor...

Probably we'll be maging the PPE's as materials, for the time being.

Anyway, thank you both for your time and help, despite all both replies are useful to me.