About the Equipment and Functional Location Adapters

The Equipment Adapter lets you extract Equipment items from your SAP system into your GE Digital APM system. When you do so, for each SAP Equipment item that meets the criteria defined in the extraction Job, a corresponding Equipment record is created in the GE Digital APM database.

Likewise, the Functional Location Adapter lets you extract Functional Locations from your SAP system into your GE Digital APM system. When you do so, for each Functional Location that meets the criteria defined in the extraction Job, a corresponding Functional Location record is created in the GE Digital APM database.

Because the SAP system allows you to define a hierarchy in which Functional Locations are related to other Functional Locations, and because Equipment items are also related to Functional Locations, when you run either the Equipment Adapter or the Functional Location Adapter, the SAP hierarchy is maintained. In some cases, to maintain the hierarchy, placeholder records are created in the GE Digital APM database to represent the SAP relationships.

For example, suppose that the SAP system contains the following Functional Locations and Equipment items, where the Functional Locations are shaded red, and the Equipment items are shaded green.

In this case, if you were to run the Functional Location Adapter, the following Functional Location records would be created automatically in the GE Digital APM database:

Then, if you were to run the Equipment Adapter, the following Equipment record would be created automatically in the GE Digital APM database:

This Equipment record would be linked automatically to the Functional Location record for FL-101-A-01.

Suppose, however, that using the same SAP data structure example, you decide to run the Equipment Adapter before running the Functional Location Adapter. In this case, when running the Equipment Adapter, the Equipment record Equipment-1 would be created automatically to represent that SAP Equipment item. In addition, the following placeholder Functional Location record would also be automatically created to represent the SAP Functional Location that is directly associated with the Equipment:

The Equipment record would be automatically linked to the Functional Location record FL-101-A-01. This placeholder record would contain a value only in the Functional Location key fields. You would need to run the Functional Location Adapter to populate the remaining fields in the placeholder Functional Location record.

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