Concepts Settings Deciding How Many Sites to Use If you have just installed APM, to get started you must decide whether to use one site or multiple sites. To help in making this decision, consider the following questions: Does your company have multiple locations? If you are implementing the software in a large organization in which you have a head office that oversees operations, possibly in several countries (or provinces or states), you will most likely use multiple sites in APM. Within the countries, you might have several locations organized into geographical regions. If you have only one geographical location, you might still want to use multiple sites. For example if there are two separate production lines, each with its own maintenance department within a location, you might decide to have a separate site for each one. Note that in APM, all sites will store their data in the same database, the APM production database. So if your locations have great distances between them, you need to consider your data communication lines to help you decide if it is feasible for these sites to be part of the single database multi-site implementation. If you have multiple locations, do they operate independently (from an equipment maintenance perspective) or do they operate as if they were one organization? If each location operates independently, at least from a maintenance standpoint, then they will want to see in APM the assets for only their site. Likewise, when reviewing their work request and work order backlogs, they will want to review the data for only their site. It will be easier to search for data when you have only the data pertaining to your site. Do you want to ensure that the multiple locations implementing APM share certain data? The multiple sites you have operate independently. However, you require some sharing of information between the maintenance organizations, so that reporting of data from APM is consistent and to allow for cross-site analyses of maintenance data. For example, if you want to take advantage of the proactive asset maintenance programs you have set up for your equipment, you can set up templates to be shared at all sites. Other Factors There may be other factors you need to consider in order to decide whether to use one or multiple sites. You should discuss this important decision with your Implementation Consultant before setting up APM.
