SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) is a component of the SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) that helps businesses support and maintain equipment and systems.

SAP PM integrates with other ECC components like Materials Management (MM), Quality Management (QM), Production Planning (PP), Sales and Distribution (SD), Finance (FI), Controlling (CO), and Human Resources (HR).

SAP PM is comprised of components for the three main activities that help companies to maintain systems or equipment:

Inspection, which establishes the actual condition of the systems or equipment;
Preventive maintenance, which helps to maintain ideal conditions for the system or equipment; and
Repair, for restoring the systems or equipment.
SAP PM allows you to manage maintenance requests and perform some repairs automatically. You can use it to record the problems in the ECC, plan labor and material activities, and record and settle costs.

SAP PM's integration with the other ECC modules keeps the data in the module current and automatically triggers processes in the other functions when required. For example, a Repair activity may trigger a purchase requisition for non-stock materials in MM or purchasing.

There are generally four groups of users that benefit most from SAP PM:

Maintenance and operations managers, who can use PM to obtain metrics on equipment performance or maintenance deployments. They can use PM to improve maintenance decision-making by running reports on work that's planned, in process, or completed. Management can also budget for equipment replenishment by having accurate and up-to-date data on equipment maintenance history and relative maintenance costs.