Managing vehicle data across the lifecycle

Vehicles in the rail industry are safety-critical assets with service lives of 30 years or more. A trainset combines thousands of components, variants, serial numbers, and software versions, along with approval and inspection documentation. This vehicle data is generated over decades, from design and certification through operation, retrofits, and ultimately decommissioning.

If this data is not consistently managed across the lifecycle, friction arises and, in the worst case, risks to safety and compliance emerge. Incorrect bills of materials, incomplete documentation, and missing maintenance records lead to duplicate data entry, delays in root cause analysis, and increased effort in maintenance operations. In the event of a failure, a familiar situation quickly unfolds: assessing the problem and identifying viable solutions becomes difficult because the data status is unclear. Which configuration is actually installed? Were second-source materials used? Which spare parts are approved? Which modifications are released? Where is the valid work instruction stored?

At the same time, requirements continue to increase: more variants, more frequent modernizations, condition monitoring, and stricter documentation obligations.

This is exactly where professional configuration management becomes a decisive factor for availability, cost control, and auditability. Organizations that manage vehicle data in a process-oriented way across the lifecycle can address issues through reliable root cause analysis. Downtime (mean time to repair) is reduced, vehicle availability is improved, and compliance with regulatory requirements is ensured.

Towards integrated, future-ready maintenance with SAP S/4HANA

The introduction of SAP S/4HANA is fundamentally changing maintenance in the rail industry, and with it the way vehicle data is managed across the entire lifecycle. Where isolated solutions such as SAP PM/CS, custom developments, document repositories, and Excel spreadsheets once existed side by side, S/4HANA brings an integrated, process-oriented approach to the forefront. Data is no longer merely stored, but created, validated, approved, and consistently maintained along end-to-end processes.

This article shows how vehicle data can be managed in a structured way across the entire lifecycle, from lifecycle logic and change and configuration management through to implementation with SAP S/4HANA Asset Management and complementary cloud components.

What are “vehicle data” – and why does it so often fail?

Across the rail vehicle lifecycle, many different types of data are created. For maintenance in particular, four domains are critical:

• Structure and configuration: vehicle variants, system structures, serial numbers, retrofit states (“as designed / as built / as maintained”), second-source materials
• Technical content: drawings, manuals, bills of materials, maintenance specifications, inspection catalogs, safety documentation
• Operational and condition data: counters, measurement values, condition monitoring data, fault messages, damage codes
• Maintenance data: maintenance plans, notifications, work orders, findings codes, feedback, material and labor consumption

Problems typically do not arise because information is missing, but because the process chain between engineering, fleet management, workshops, materials management, and external partners is not consistently closed. Common symptoms include:

• Unclear leading systems, resulting in competing versions of the truth
• Changes without an end-to-end change process, meaning updates are not reflected across all systems
• Weak identification logic due to missing serial numbers, position identifiers, or classifications
• Lack of governance, including unclear responsibilities for creating or changing data and insufficient review and approval mechanisms

Robust vehicle data management therefore does not start with “more data,” but with clear lifecycle processes and defined responsibilities.

SAP IPD: End-to-end continuity from design to maintenance

SAP IPD addresses product-related processes holistically and is used in asset-intensive industries to manage product structures, changes, and related information consistently, from the engineering view in design through the production view to the maintenance view of assets. In engineering, product and variant structures are defined and changes are controlled as effective engineering changes with defined validity, for example by serial number, date, or software version. Production feeds back what has actually been installed and creates a reliable as-built baseline. Maintenance then continues to maintain the data status after replacements, retrofits, and updates, using revision-safe documents that are linked to the valid structure.

The result is correct parts lists, document versions, and work content without manual rework. Retrofits, certification changes, or modernizations are therefore automatically provided with accurate bills of materials, document versions, and maintenance work content to support the planning and execution of modifications.

SAP APM: From “plan” to performance – condition- and risk-based management

SAP APM enables a functional view of assets, such as brake systems or HVAC systems. These are modeled as systems and linked to failure modes. Condition data is therefore not viewed merely as raw measurements, but as indicators of defined failure modes along with their causes and consequences. This makes it possible, on the one hand, to assess risk and urgency based on an observed failure pattern, and on the other hand to derive defined condition-based recommendations that directly impact risk and availability. Criticality and risk are used to prioritize actions based on failure consequences rather than frequency alone. Standardized digital inspections are aligned with failure modes and make findings comparable. In a closed-loop process, findings and failures are fed back into thresholds and plans. Value is created only with a clean data foundation and a process of “recommendation → work order → feedback.”

SAP BNAC: Collaboration across organizational boundaries on the digital twin

Many rail organizations do not fail internally, but at the interfaces. As a result, OEM changes, spare parts information, maintenance specifications, obsolete components, and feedback from service partners are lost. This is where SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration is positioned as a platform that provides a global registry and a structured collaboration mechanism, with a clear asset reference, shared definitions, and integration options via SAP BTP.

BNAC is structured into the following areas:

• Asset registry: Standardized and unambiguous identification and maintenance of asset details, such as maintenance plans, warranty information, and technical master data
• Network: Controlled connectivity between OEMs, operators, and service providers
• Collaboration: Joint maintenance activities and the provision and use of up-to-date asset and condition data
• Integration: BTP-based integration with live data from SAP systems, as well as connectivity to non-SAP systems

For the rail industry, it is also relevant that BNAC references the EN 15380 classification for rail vehicles as a standard. This supports a consistent assignment of vehicle and component classes across organizational boundaries.

Practical scenario:
An OEM publishes a revised maintenance instruction for a brake system with new thresholds or intervals and links it to the affected vehicle model and the relevant spare parts. Operators and service partners access the same up-to-date data, and the change can be transferred into their own planning and work order processes in a traceable and version-controlled manner.

Conclusion

Managing vehicle data across the lifecycle means establishing a digital process chain, from product structures and changes through planning, execution, and feedback to cross-partner collaboration. The key lever is not “more tools,” but clear governance, robust configuration and change management, and a consistent feedback and quality logic.

SAP solutions can be used in a complementary way: SAP IPD structures product and change processes, SAP APM supports the transition to condition- and risk-based maintenance, and SAP BNAC provides the foundation for controlled collaboration with OEMs and service partners as a standardized asset registry and collaboration platform.

Organizations that bring these building blocks together in a process-oriented manner achieve exactly what maintenance in the rail context requires: higher data reliability, improved planning capability, fewer unplanned outages, and a traceable documentation chain across the entire vehicle lifecycle.

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