Manage Equipment Maintenance in Business Central: Plan Smarter, Prevent Downtime

Welcome and Agenda

Hi, good day everyone. This is Eric, and today I’m going to take you through our latest product release, Maintenance Manager. We’ll look at how it helps you manage your maintenance activities in Business Central.

For today’s presentation, we’ll talk a little bit about Insight Works, then we’ll do an intro to Maintenance Manager and go through a demo. We’ll also cover how you can get it, pricing, and everything else.

We’re expecting about 45 minutes for the presentation today, roughly, depending on the questions you have. If you do have questions, there’s a question box in the GoToWebinar panel. Just enter your questions there and I’ll do my best to answer them as we go through the session. If I don’t get to them, we’ll email you the answers afterward.

This session is being recorded, and you’ll get a link to download that after the session as well. With that, let’s get started.

About Insight Works

Just a little bit about Insight Works. We’ve been around for about 10 years. If you know us, you’ve probably seen this slide before. We’ve got a lot of resellers, and that’s how we prefer to work.

If your existing Business Central partner is one of our resellers, they’ll be able to help you out with pricing information and everything else. If not, you can always contact us through our website chat box, contact form, and so on. We’re happy to help you with whatever questions you have.

With Maintenance Manager, as you’ll see in a bit, we’re really focused on production assets. We’ll do maintenance on anything, but we’re focused on filling that gap on the manufacturing side of things. On the manufacturing side, we’ve got a lot of capability, and we’re very strong there. That manufacturing focus is going to tie directly into the discussion today as we get into the maintenance side of things.

Free Apps That Work Well with Maintenance Manager

As part of the suite of products we have available, we also have a number of free apps. I’m not going to get into these in a ton of detail, other than to mention that most of these work really well alongside Maintenance Manager.

• Enhanced Planning Worksheet: Helps with planning maintenance activities. It’s part of our Enhanced Planning Pack (a paid app), but the Enhanced Planning Worksheet itself is also available as a standalone app for free for a single concurrent user, directly from AppSource.
• Graphical Scheduler: Helps visualize the maintenance schedule. We’ll see it a bit during the demo.
• Doc Extender: Drag-and-drop maintenance documents onto the assets. You can store files as attachments in Business Central or in SharePoint, and then generate alerts, document revisions, and related workflows.
• Ordership Express: Domestic parcel shipping. If you need to ship parts for an asset, or an actual asset, you can generate shipping labels and manage shipping right from within Business Central.
• WMS Express: Free warehouse management. If you want to start barcoding your parts or inventory, you can use WMS Express for receiving, picking, shipping, bin movements, and inventory counts. Even if you don’t need it for full warehouse operations, it can be useful for managing spare parts during maintenance.

All of these can work directly with Maintenance Manager, and even if you don’t have Maintenance Manager, you can use these with standard Business Central to perform those functions.

Manufacturing Apps and Why They Matter for Maintenance

Let’s talk a little bit about manufacturing. Some key applications we have on the manufacturing side start with the Enhanced Planning Pack, which provides tools for planning, forecasting, and analysis. You use it to plan production, purchasing, and related tasks, and it can also plan maintenance work orders.

For scheduling, you can use the Graphical Scheduler, which is a free drag-and-drop tool that lets you move production orders, maintenance orders, and so on. Or, if you want to be more automated, you can use MXAPS, which is automated production scheduling. You can run it on demand or schedule it to run at a set time each day. It generates production and maintenance schedules based on your capacities and constraints, like labor and inventory availability.

Once the schedule is complete, we take it to the shop floor. There, we collect data like labor time, completion quantities, and other activity details, while also presenting relevant information to employees doing the work. We can also capture quality information directly from the shop floor within Business Central.

After production is complete, you can use WMS Express or Warehouse Insight to move product into the warehouse, pick for shipping, and perform other warehouse tasks. And finally, you can ship using Dynamic Ship or Order Ship Express.

You might be thinking, “Why did I just share all this manufacturing stuff?” Here’s why: there’s a gap between scheduling and execution in Business Central when it comes to maintenance activities. Business Central doesn’t provide a good way to keep track of maintenance activities. You can take a work center down with a registered absence, but there’s no real functionality for scheduling maintenance, recording maintenance activities on a tablet or handheld device, or using a shop terminal for maintenance capture.

What Maintenance Manager Is and What It Solves

That’s where Maintenance Manager comes in. Beyond allowing generic maintenance on things like forklifts, laptops, or other office assets, the goal is to enable maintenance for production assets in a way that impacts scheduling and data capture for those assets. Maintenance Manager fills that gap between execution and scheduling.

And yes, you can still use it to maintain laptops, potted plants, light bulbs—whatever else you like. Also, if you’re using Warehouse Insight, one of the free add-ons in the add-on catalog is a fixed asset count add-on. That lets you generate fixed asset labels and use handheld scanners to count them, and it integrates well with Maintenance Manager for printing and counting assets in addition to managing asset maintenance.

There are plenty of EAM (enterprise asset management) solutions and other asset maintenance solutions out there for Business Central. Maintenance Manager isn’t a full-blown EAM solution. It sits more in the realm of a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system), focused specifically on the maintenance activities for your assets.

One big reason to use it is that it works seamlessly with existing Business Central capabilities and any third-party ISV apps. We do that by leveraging production orders in Business Central to manage maintenance. When we create a maintenance order, it’s actually a version of a production order, which means anything that works with production orders—picking, warehouse activities, production activities—also works with maintenance orders.

Another advantage is handling the movement of assets. In Business Central, you can set a location code on the fixed asset card, but that’s manual and there’s no real ship/receive workflow for assets between locations, to subcontractors, or into a maintenance area. Maintenance Manager enables you to use standard inventory and warehouse functions to manage those assets: warehouse shipments, transfers, receiving, and moving into maintenance areas.

That also makes it easy to set up and use. If you know production functionality, there’s very little extra to learn. A big challenge with implementing maintenance software is getting people off paper and into a system, and leveraging production processes makes it much easier to set up and use.

Demo Overview: Setup and Key Concepts

Now that I’ve sold you on it, let’s jump in and see what the solution looks like in Business Central. I’m using the role center for Maintenance Manager. I’ll show you a little bit of setup, then we’ll dive in and look at how it works.

There’s not much to set up. When you install it from AppSource, you run the setup wizard, it applies default data, and that fills in most of the setup for you. You don’t have to change much to get started, but there are a few key things worth pointing out.

One is a placeholder work center. This allows us, when we’re maintaining a specific asset—like a work center or machine center such as a boring mill or laser cutter—to schedule time on that piece of equipment when creating the maintenance work order. Remember, the maintenance work order is a production order behind the scenes. We do this so it uses the capacity for that equipment during the maintenance period. If you’re using MXAPS for automated scheduling, it won’t schedule production on that equipment at the same time maintenance is occurring.

Another feature is automatically updating runtimes and cycle counts during normal production. For example, if you have an injection molding machine with preventative maintenance every 100,000 cycles, the system updates the cycle count as you complete production orders. If you complete a production order for 10,000 units, it adds those cycles to the interval on the equipment. The same applies to runtime. If maintenance is every 500 hours and you record runtime on production orders, the system tracks that and knows when the next maintenance is due.

There are also two options when setting up Maintenance Manager: you can treat the equipment you maintain as inventory items, or you can choose not to track equipment as inventory.

• If you track equipment as inventory, assets are stored in inventory (often as zero-cost items). You can ship, receive, move between bins, and use standard inventory and warehouse processes. Maintenance costs are captured through posting groups into maintenance accounts (and optionally to fixed assets), rather than increasing the inventory value.
• If you do not track equipment as inventory, you still have a maintenance equipment item, but you don’t track shipping/receiving and inventory movement for that equipment.

In this demo setup, I’ve chosen to keep equipment in inventory as zero-cost inventory.

Fixed Assets, Maintenance Equipment Items, and Assignments

In the background, there are two types of things you can set up. First, you have your fixed assets, which is your standard list of fixed assets in Business Central. You’re not necessarily going to maintain all of them, so we have a subset designated specifically for maintenance.

Those maintenance fixed assets are linked to what we call a maintenance equipment item. If you decide to link maintenance to your fixed assets, you get additional information on the fixed asset card: the location where the asset is maintained (even if the asset is currently elsewhere), whether it’s on a maintenance work order, the next service date, and other details.

You can take an existing fixed asset and click “Create Maintenance Equipment item.” That generates a maintenance item and links it to the fixed asset, so you can use it in Maintenance Manager. It’s quick and easy. But you don’t have to use fixed assets at all. You can create and maintain assets without a fixed asset record, which is common for tooling or shop equipment that still requires maintenance but doesn’t need to be tracked as a fixed asset.

Maintenance equipment items are the actual things you’re maintaining. These are treated as items in Business Central. There are two categories for items: maintenance equipment and spare parts. Spare parts are also just items in Business Central, so purchasing and inventory management are standard.

For maintenance equipment, you have maintenance-specific details like capacity type. If it’s a production asset, you can specify which work center or machine center it belongs to so scheduling blocks off time for that equipment during maintenance. You can also link to fixed asset information like serial numbers. The activation date is used as the baseline for maintenance intervals, and it can be pulled from fixed asset acquisition/depreciation details where applicable.

You then assign maintenance tasks to equipment. For example, an oil change based on distance and a weekly inspection based on time. You can see intervals showing the last recorded maintenance and the current interval values. For vehicles, distance may be manually entered, but for production assets like work centers or machine centers, runtime and output counts can update automatically based on normal production activity posted against production orders.

So the setup is essentially: create maintenance equipment items, assign tasks to them, and define intervals. Most intervals can be updated automatically depending on the type of equipment and your production tracking.

Maintenance Parts

Maintenance parts are treated exactly the same as regular items. The only real difference is a flag identifying an item as a maintenance part. That categorization helps separate spare parts from normal inventory, but you still use standard replenishment and planning parameters for purchasing spare parts automatically.

In this setup, equipment items show as in stock because they’re tracked as inventory, but their cost remains at zero. Even if you perform significant maintenance, the costs are captured through posting groups into maintenance accounts, not into inventory value. With this approach, you can transfer and move equipment items. During maintenance, the system can remove an equipment item from inventory temporarily, making it unavailable for other purposes. For constraints like tooling or molds, maintenance reduces availability and scheduling tools like MXAPS can account for that.

Maintenance Tasks and Requests

Everything else revolves around what we call a maintenance task. Once equipment is set up, you perform tasks against that equipment. There are two ways to set up tasks: create a new maintenance task, or create a maintenance request.

Maintenance requests are designed so anyone in the shop can report issues, similar to a corrective action report. If a piece of equipment breaks down, someone can alert maintenance to fix it. Any Business Central user can create maintenance requests without needing a Maintenance Manager license. You select the equipment, set a priority, fill in details, click OK, and the system creates a maintenance task.

Maintenance tasks include different types, such as corrective action for break-fix situations, preventative maintenance, and template tasks for reusable templates. Corrective actions outline the issue, and when you’re ready to begin, you change the status to active.

For preventative maintenance, when you activate the task, the system blocks the asset’s capacity. If it’s a production asset, it becomes unavailable to the scheduling system. The maintenance order appears on scheduling tools so you can avoid scheduling production during that time.

How Maintenance Is Defined: Intervals, BOMs, and Routings

A maintenance task defines how often the work needs to be done, what asset it applies to, the parts required, and any work instructions. To perform maintenance, the system uses a bill of materials (BOM) and a routing, just like production.

The BOM tracks components required to complete the maintenance. The routing defines the time required and the work steps. That placeholder work center is key: if the asset is a production asset, the placeholder is replaced with the work center where work is performed, ensuring capacity is blocked during maintenance. You can include work instructions in the routing, and those instructions show up on job cards and in Shop Floor Insight.

Planning and Creating Maintenance Orders

Once everything is set up, how do you execute a maintenance task? For one-off tasks, you can click “Plan Task.” If intervals and conditions match, the system creates planning worksheet lines so you can review components, make substitutions, and adjust as needed.

If you’re managing equipment as inventory, you’ll see a line for the equipment item because the system temporarily removes it from stock during maintenance and then returns it when complete. If you’re not managing equipment as inventory, you wouldn’t see that line.

After review, you carry out the action message and the system generates a maintenance order (a firm planned maintenance order). It looks like a standard production order, but includes maintenance-specific information. When you’re ready, you release the order and execute it. You can set the order status (for example, pending to in progress) and update interval values such as mileage. When the order is finished, the system updates the maintenance interval on the asset automatically using that value.

Execution can be done using standard production journals, output and consumption journals, and you can print the shop floor job card with work instructions, required components, and barcodes for tracking time if you’re using Shop Floor Insight.

Maintenance order components become demand items, so running the planning worksheet includes them in purchasing plans, prompting the system to order parts that aren’t in stock.

Auto Scheduling and Interval Flexibility

If you have hundreds of maintenance tasks, doing them one by one may not be practical. Instead, you can use auto schedule by specifying a date range. The system schedules all maintenance due between those dates based on intervals like time, mileage, output counts, and runtime. It generates a plan that includes tasks to be performed and spare parts required for planned maintenance.

You don’t necessarily need to carry out action messages to do purchasing for spare parts, because you can use regenerative planning or purchase planning (including with the Enhanced Planning Worksheet) to ensure spare parts are ordered in advance. You can also convert orders into firm planned orders to lock them into place and ensure production isn’t scheduled during the maintenance timeframes.

Intervals are flexible. You can track maintenance by distance, runtime, output count, or duration (weekly, monthly, annual). Runtime and output count can be captured automatically from production orders. You can also specify a start interval, such as only scheduling a weekly task after the first year of the asset’s life.

There’s also a “Plan Maintenance” option that looks at what’s required immediately now rather than scheduling into the future, generating the corresponding maintenance orders. In Business Central, production orders and maintenance orders are the same behind the scenes, but we differentiate by calling them maintenance orders when discussing maintenance.

Viewing Maintenance on Calendars and Schedulers

To view all maintenance orders, you can open the list and execute tasks or make adjustments. You can also view orders on a schedule in two ways.

First is the maintenance calendar. It’s configurable for monthly, weekly, daily, or other views. You can see scheduled maintenance tasks and drag and drop to reschedule them, which updates the maintenance order in the background. You can also open an order directly from the calendar to see details.

Second is viewing maintenance alongside production in the Graphical Scheduler or MXAPS. This provides a combined view of production and maintenance orders. Maintenance orders appear alongside production orders, and you can configure visual differentiation like color coding. Maintenance loads capacity on equipment, which is why it can be scheduled alongside production.

With MXAPS, you can optimize scheduling by finding time windows that minimize disruption—placing maintenance between jobs or at times that reduce the impact on production instead of sticking to rigid time slots.

Purchasing Spare Parts for Planned Maintenance

Once equipment and parts are set up, and tasks and intervals are defined, you plan maintenance using automated planning or auto scheduling. Then you use the planning worksheet to manage parts needed for those tasks.

Using the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, you can calculate the purchase plan specifically for maintenance parts. That generates the list of items you need to buy to support the planned maintenance queue.

Execution with Shop Floor Insight

On the execution side, I showed the job card earlier as the shop floor traveler. Now, let’s quickly look at Shop Floor Insight as a technician. This isn’t mandatory, but it works well with Maintenance Manager for capturing production information like outputs, runtimes, and setup times, and it can also be used for maintenance tasks.

A technician can scan in on a shared terminal, or use a tablet, phone, or scanning device. They can open maintenance orders, see details, and clock onto the maintenance order. The interface displays work instructions, linked manuals, supporting documents, and even pictures of equipment location. Documentation can be accessed right from the shop floor.

In this example, documents were added using the free Doc Extender app by dragging and dropping manuals onto the equipment item in Business Central, making them accessible (for example, from SharePoint) in the shop floor interface. When a technician taps “clock on,” the system tracks the actual time associated with that maintenance activity, capturing maintenance time seamlessly within the system.

Q&A Highlights

Graphical Scheduler Webinar

A question came in asking whether there’s a webinar for the Graphical Scheduler. Yes, there are webinars for the Graphical Scheduler. The next one wasn’t confirmed during the session, but there are also resources in the online knowledge base and overview videos that cover configuration, views, and filtering.

Sending Assets Offsite for Maintenance

Another question asked if you can send an asset to an offsite intercompany partner for maintenance and what the best methodology would be. The approach depends on your company setup, but if maintenance items are set up as inventory items (as described earlier), you can use standard Business Central transactions to move them: transfer orders, sales and purchase documents for shipping and receiving, or other inventory processes depending on whether it’s location-to-location within the same company or across companies.

Connecting Maintenance Equipment Items to Spare Parts

A question asked whether it’s possible to connect maintenance equipment items to spare parts (or vice versa). The connection is handled through the maintenance task, using the production bill of materials and routing. The BOM defines what parts are needed for the maintenance, and the routing describes the work steps. You set up the BOM and routing, then assign the task to one or multiple maintenance equipment items.

Fixed Asset vs. Non-Fixed Asset Setup

Another question asked whether assets can be set up for fixed or non-inventory. The maintenance equipment item is an item record flagged for maintenance categorization. You don’t have to use fixed assets if you don’t want to. If something doesn’t need to be tracked as a fixed asset, you can maintain it using only the maintenance equipment item without creating a fixed asset record.

Pricing and How to Get Maintenance Manager

Maintenance Manager is available on AppSource. It requires a Premium Business Central license because it uses production orders for maintenance activities. While it’s primarily designed for production asset maintenance, you can absolutely use it for other assets like laptops or vehicles.

When you install it from AppSource, you’ll see two plans available, and both come with a 30-day free trial so you can test it out at no cost.

• Maintenance Manager User Plan: Purchased directly from Microsoft and billed monthly or annually. Cost is about 45 euro per user per month after the trial, with a discount for annual subscriptions. This cost is intended for the user who manages and configures maintenance (setting up equipment items, tasks, and configuration). In most cases, you only need one user license for that role.
• Pre-purchase Plan: The plan is free to get from AppSource, and licenses are purchased separately through your partner or directly from Insight Works. Cost is 170 euro per company per month for unlimited users, with discounts for annual or three-year subscriptions. This option allows unlimited Maintenance Manager users within the company.

Technicians performing maintenance and recording time or parts usage typically don’t need a Maintenance Manager license, because they’re executing maintenance through production orders using standard Business Central functionality. The Maintenance Manager license is needed for the administrators managing and configuring maintenance tasks.

Closing

I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, you can go to cmmsfordynamics.com where you’ll find videos, resources, and more details about everything we covered today.

There are a couple of questions still in the queue that I’m not going to get to right now, but we will definitely follow up with you over email and answer any questions that I didn’t answer here. I hope you guys have a great rest of the week/p>