Integrated maintenance planning

Higher performance and lower costs for technical systems thanks to long-term resource security with integrated maintenance planning.  

In today’s volatile landscape, companies increasingly rely on strategic planning to navigate uncertainty. As German economist Günter Wöhe aptly described, planning is “the anticipation of future actions by weighing various alternative courses of action and deciding on the most favorable path”. This forward-thinking approach equips businesses with a solid foundation to withstand unpredictable challenges and reduce risk exposure. 

The past few years have vividly highlighted the critical role of planning, particularly in light of global supply chain disruptions and labor shortages. Securing limited yet essential resources has become both a priority and a persistent challenge.  

One area gaining attention is maintenance planning. While many organizations have traditionally focused on short-term horizons – typically around eight weeks and centered on specific maintenance tasks – there is a rising need to embrace medium-term (beyond eight weeks) and long-term (over a year) strategies. However, these longer perspectives are still often underutilized.  

A contributing factor may be a common managerial mindset that relies on past success as justification for the status quo – an assumption that may not hold in an increasingly complex and uncertain future. 

Balancing objectives, requirements, and resources in maintenance planning 

Regardless of the planning horizon, the core objective of maintenance planning remains unchanged: to ensure that the right resources and materials are available at the right time to carry out necessary maintenance activities efficiently and effectively. This is essential for maximizing asset availability and reliability. Alongside doing the right tasks on time, an equally important focus is on efficiency: making the best possible use of personnel, vehicles, tools, materials, and service providers. 

Effective maintenance planning aims to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) while extending the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), all while keeping maintenance and inventory costs under control. Short-term planning deals with the immediate allocation of existing resources, while medium- and long-term planning anticipates future demands and proactively prepares for them.  

This includes strategies such as  

• recruiting, retaining and training personnel,
• procuring and reserving tools and equipment,
• as well as the timely involvement of external service providers.  

Although these actions may seem straightforward, they are becoming increasingly complex due to rapid, cross-sectoral shifts and evolving operational demands. 

An equation with many variables: Navigating data gaps and secondary requirements in future planning 

Forecasting future requirements has become more and more difficult in today’s dynamic environment. Organizations typically base their maintenance needs on established strategies, which heavily rely on accurate and comprehensive databases – capturing historical maintenance activities, current schedules, and the real-time condition of assets. Unfortunately, many companies lack such robust data foundations. Secondary requirements add further complexity: When components are replaced, they often require refurbishment or must be manufactured internally or externally. These secondary requirements introduce additional planning variables, lead times, and coordination challenges, making effective maintenance planning even more demanding. 

Evolving plant portfolios add yet another layer of complexity to maintenance planning. Existing machinery and systems are often repurposed, while new assets – with new maintenance requirements – are regularly introduced. Recent years have brought significant changes: Almost all newly installed systems now feature digital components that require entirely different maintenance approaches compared to traditional mechanical or electrical systems. This transition not only alters the types of maintenance needed but also reshapes the qualification profiles required for both internal teams and external service providers.  

Proactive integrated maintenance planning 

Long-term maintenance planning depends on early awareness of all influencing factors to enable timely, proactive action. However, knowledge of these factors is often scattered across different individuals and departments, requiring close collaboration within an integrated planning process to achieve optimal outcomes.  

When proactive steps are delayed, addressing emerging issues becomes more difficult – especially problematic in the current skilled labor shortage, where expanding or training teams may take months or even years. Similar constraints apply to the availability of tools, spare parts, and qualified external service providers. 

Importance of integration and data updates in long-term maintenance 

Effective and efficient maintenance planning requires comprehensive integration. Integration, in this case, also means aligning with the plans and priorities of other departments that influence – or are influenced by – maintenance activities.  

Key areas include: 

1. Personnel planning 

HR should share data on capacity, employee absences, and departures with maintenance, while maintenance should communicate its staffing needs, including the required qualifications, to HR. 

2. Production planning/asset portfolio planning 

Data from production should be shared with maintenance to help forecast future requirements, coordinate equipment usage, and manage downtimes. 

3. Procurement planning 

Early access to supplier information allows for more efficient planning of orders. Maintenance should communicate its material and service provider needs early to procurement. This allows for suitable suppliers to be found and integrated into the process. 

4. Financial planning 

Maintenance planning feeds vital data into financial planning, facilitating budgeting that frames maintenance planning within financial constraints. 

Maintaining up-to-date data is critical, especially in a fast-changing environment where shifting conditions can heavily impact supply chains and product availability. Even standard or seemingly simple products may experience delays due to shortages in essential preliminary components. At the same time, the prices of required tools and spare parts can vary significantly. 

Beyond Excel: The need for specialized integrated systems 

Relying solely on Excel is inadequate for the demands of integrated maintenance planning. Organizations require specialized, interconnected systems that centralize both master data – such as equipment specifications, maintenance strategies, and scheduling information – and transactional data, including maintenance orders and confirmations. In SAP environments, this functionality is typically managed through SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP. 

To fully harness available data, companies need dedicated planning applications tailored to maintenance and supply chain demands. Within SAP S/4HANA, short-term planning is supported by tools like SAP S/4HANA Asset Management for Resource Scheduling (RSH) and SAP Material Requirements Planning (MRP). For broader, end-to-end supply chain coordination, SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) offers a cloud-based platform.  

Specifically for maintenance planning, SAP IBP for Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) provides a targeted module. 

SAP Integrated Business Planning for Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) 

This tool integrates seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA, drawing in both master and transactional data to determine future requirements based on the specific maintenance strategy in use.  

• Preventive maintenance: Requirements are derived from time- or usage-based cyclic maintenance schedules. 

• Corrective maintenance: Forecasts are based on historical incident data, helping anticipate and prepare for reactive maintenance needs. 

• Condition-based and predictive maintenance: relies on sensor inputs and digital asset data to assess real-time system conditions and predict potential failures before they occur. 

• Special cases: Requirements arise from unique scenarios such as asset renewal projects, system upgrades, plant expansions, customer service agreements, or long-term sales forecasts. 

Integrated maintenance planning in practice: from requirements to realizable planning 

Once requirements are assessed, they must be aligned with available resources to define concrete, actionable measures. This is an iterative process, repeated until a balanced, feasible maintenance schedule is achieved. Additional functions – such as inventory optimization – are available to enhance accuracy and efficiency. Users typically interact with these planning tools via a web-based interface or an Excel front end. 

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) plays a complementary role in this ecosystem by supporting financial planning. Results generated by SAP IBP for MRO can be integrated into SAC, enabling organization-wide budget harmonization and strategic alignment.  

A complete planning cycle also includes an Actual vs. Target comparison, which can be conducted using either SAP IBP or SAC. This evaluation leverages the target data from SAP IBP and SAC and the actual data stored in SAP S/4HANA.