Why is maintenance so important?
As part of the maintenance of machines and assets, the aim is to prevent them from breaking down unexpectedly over time. Regular and careful maintenance work ensures that the degree of wear and tear on the machine does not increase, thereby reducing the risk of failure. In critical areas in particular - e.g. in energy supply systems - maintenance in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions is essential. In these cases, structured maintenance planning is essential.
Regular maintenance is also an important aspect from a business management perspective . Due to the predefined maintenance intervals, maintenance work corresponds to plannable activities and can be scheduled as efficiently as possible with sufficient preparation time and an early reminder - e.g. using maintenance planning software. This allows, for example, several maintenance assignments to be combined, saving travel time and ultimately costs . Unexpected machine failures, on the other hand, correspond to unplanned activities and usually have to be rectified on an ad-hoc basis. This results in significantly higher costs - e.g. due to inefficient travel or express costs for material shipping, which can be prevented by regular maintenance.
What are the difficulties with maintenance planning?
Large number of maintenance objects
The larger the company's service division, the more customers and maintenance objects it supports. As a result, the overview of all due maintenance dates is increasingly lost. Added to this is the complexity of maintenance monitoring. Often it is no longer just the property that is due within a certain interval. Even subordinate components have their own maintenance cycles that need to be taken into account.
Consideration of contracts
Another difficulty for maintenance planners is the consideration of maintenance and servicing contracts and their terms. Within the contracts, customer-specific and Asset-specific maintenance intervals are defined that deviate from the standard of the Asset. In addition, the scope of the maintenance work to be carried out is often contractually agreed between the customer and the maintenance company, leading to increasing complexity.
Individualization and technical complexity
As part of maintenance planning, it must be emphasized that not all objects are maintained at the same intervals. In particular, if the intervals are based on counter values - e.g. operating hours - are defined, planning becomes much more complex. Other factors such as the degree of utilization of the machines (e.g. operating hours per day) also have an influence on the next maintenance due date.
Appointment coordination and route planning
As soon as the due maintenance work has been determined, further difficulties can arise in the context of scheduling and route planning. On the one hand, scheduling usually has to be agreed with the customer in advance, and on the other hand, maintenance work should be grouped into geographical grids in order to keep travel times and the resulting costs as low as possible. Only software-supported planning can guarantee optimum customer satisfaction and routes.
Contact us to find out more about intelligent maintenance planning in ADASMA.
What tasks does the maintenance plan software perform?
Maintenance planning in ADASMA
With ADASMA, you can map all of your customers' maintenance objects in a structured and clear manner. You can define standards that should always apply to an object type, but you can also make completely individual maintenance settings. The maintenance intervals are aggregated in ADASMA within maintenance plans. This has the advantage, , that you can integrate several consecutive intervals into a higher-level plan. The structure could, for example as follows (can be customized as required):
- Every 400 operating hours: Oil change
- Every 2,000 operating hours: Standard regular maintenance
- Every 10,000 operating hours: Regular maintenance + overhaul Component A
- Every 40,000 operating hours: Major overhaul of the object
The maintenance plans are in turn assigned to the objects. Based on the Asset history and taking into account the automatically calculated degree of utilization of the property, the future maintenance dates are determined by an intelligent algorithm.
Order management and Operational planning
Once the maintenance due dates have been determined, ADASMA also provides you with full support for the downstream planning process. As an Operational planner, you generate orders or operations directly from the maintenance tickets. These operations are displayed on our integrated planning board as "incomplete planned operations". You can use the map section to further optimize the routes and ensure that no routes overlap unnecessarily, especially if you have several operations and Technicians. Finally, simply drag and drop the operations onto the appropriate service technician to schedule them.
Digital integration of service technicians
With our field service app, your service technicians immediately receive a notification about the new operation. All documents such as maintenance checklists, measurement logs, time recording and images are recorded quickly and easily via the mobile app. Finally, the resulting service report is confirmed by the digital signatures and all data is transmitted to the head office once the job has been completed. ADASMA uses the information transmitted by the service technician to predict the next maintenance dates.
Schedule a webinar to learn more about ADASMA's seamless service lifecycle management.