Maintenance Planning

Maintenance Planners typically use a CMMS to plan a course of action to maintain or repair equipment.  Included in these tasks are: planning, scheduling, and gathering the parts and tools required to work on the asset.  In this process, parts are selected from a material master or a bill of material (BOM) and added to a work order.

Maintenance planning without visual BOMs

Identifying parts and adding to work orders in the CMMS is a surprisingly difficult task for several reasons:

1. Part numbers have no visual reference
2. Out of date OEM parts books
3. Part-related information is difficult to find

All in all, these issues cause significant delays to maintenance, increased wrench time, significant supply chain costs, and resource drain.

1. No Visual Reference

When selecting parts for maintenance planning, it is critical to avoid errors.  Errors occur when incorrect parts are ordered and lead to delays in wrench time, additional MRO costs, and possible delays to other maintenance activities which require the incorrect part.  Without a visual reference, maintenance planners are much more likely to incur errors.  To avoid this, they often undergo an intensive process of locating the OEM part book and finding the part number manually.  This process can take significant time, and opens up the door for more errors due to;

2. Obsolete OEM parts books

Throughout the lifecycle of an asset, part numbers are changed by the equipment manufacturer (supersessions) and engineers often swap out components and parts.  These changes are often not captured and reflected in OEM parts books, which means the visual reference for part numbers becomes invalid.

3. Part-related information is difficult to find

Once a part is identified, maintenance planners need to locate additional information; reserved/unreserved stock on hand, warehouse information, order on quantity, and more.  It takes significant time finding the part and then navigating through SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, or any other CMMS to gather the required information.

Visual BOMs for Maintenance Planning

The most efficient maintenance planning organizations employ visual BOMs to accurately identify parts and quickly add them to work orders.  When deployed and maintained correctly, Visual BOMs:

1. Provide critical visual reference to part numbers within the CMMS
2. Accurately capture supersessions
3. Quickly locate additional information