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

Introduction

Good evening everyone. Today we’re going to go through the topic of maintenance. We’re going to talk about Maintenance Manager and how you can quickly and easily use an electronic maintenance management solution within Business Central.

What we’re planning on discussing today is a little bit about us, an intro to what our Maintenance Manager solution is, what it’s intended for, where it fits in your world, a bit of a demo, and then how you can get it and try it out. If you have any questions as we’re going through the session, feel free to enter those in the GoToWebinar panel or the chat panel, and I’ll do my best to answer them as we go.

About Insight Works

We’ve been around for just over 10 years now. We work primarily through resellers, so if you have questions about this solution or any of the others I’ll briefly talk about today, go through your partner. If they don’t have the answers for you, you can contact us on the website and we’ll help you out.

We work mostly in manufacturing and distribution. We also have retail — a counter-sale solution — which means that any time you’re physically having to touch inventory, we’re likely going to have a solution that helps you with that process, whether that’s warehouse management, shipping, counter sales, production, or any of those other things.

Our Application Ecosystem

We have well over 60 applications and add-ons available within Business Central, and a number of those are free — both as add-ons and as apps you can get from AppSource at no cost. I’ll mention a few of these quickly because they do play with Maintenance Manager. Maintenance Manager is part of a larger solution stack, and some of these fit in there.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet is one worth highlighting. If you’re using the planning worksheet or requisition worksheet in Business Central today, use this instead — it’s free and it’s better, especially on the warehouse side, where it offers better planning logic for warehouse procurement and related activities. We also have a Sales Forecasting app, and that’s also a free app.

Some of the more commonly used apps include Graphical Scheduler, which is basically drag-and-drop scheduling. You can use that with maintenance, and Maintenance Manager uses it to display a maintenance calendar in an Outlook-style view. You can also use Graphical Scheduler for production information, maintenance, custom data — whatever you want to put on there.

Doc Extender provides drag-and-drop document management. If you want to attach maintenance guides and things like that to your assets, you can drag and drop using Doc Extender. You can use the built-in Business Central attachment capability, but Doc Extender is a bit nicer because it’s easier to use and it will also store all that information in SharePoint in a clean, accessible way.

Order Ship Express and WMS Express cover shipping and warehouse management. Even if you don’t have large warehouse management requirements, something like WMS Express can be handy for spare parts on the maintenance side. If I’m picking parts to a maintenance order, I can use WMS Express to do that picking or run an inventory count of my parts inventory on a handheld scanner-style device.

Safety Logbook may also be useful on the maintenance side. It can track HSE events and log certifications and other related information.

Where Maintenance Manager Fits

Maintenance Manager is really positioned around production asset maintenance. The focus is on work centers, machine centers, and the assets you use within production — that’s what it was built for. You can use it to track anything you like, including office equipment, but it’s really tailored to work with those production assets.

Within the broader manufacturing workflow, we plan everything in for production using the enhanced planning pack, send it out to be scheduled using automated production scheduling and the Graphical Scheduler, and then execute using Shop Floor Insight to capture labor time, component usage, and related data. That integrates with Quality Inspector for quality information capture. Microsoft has also released their own Quality Management module, which is actually a subset of Quality Inspector — they licensed Quality Inspector and turned a subset of it into Quality Management. You can use either one to manage things like equipment inspections or lockout procedures.

Once manufacturing is complete, output is fulfilled through WMS Express or Warehouse Insight for scanning, shipping, and everything else. But the key piece missing from that picture is maintenance activities. If I’m scheduling production and my equipment goes down because it broke, or preventative maintenance is scheduled right when a rush order is running through, that creates conflicts on the shop floor. The ability to include maintenance activities within the production scheduling and execution environment is exactly where Maintenance Manager comes in.

About Maintenance Manager

Maintenance Manager is a lightweight tool. We’re not an enterprise asset management solution — we’re a basic CMMS that helps you schedule maintenance activities alongside your production activities. That’s really the goal. But you can also track laptops, phones, vehicles, or any other assets within Maintenance Manager if you want to.

From a preventative maintenance perspective, it allows you to create schedules for PM tasks and automatically schedule them into the future so you get an idea of what spare parts you’re going to need. With production assets like work centers and machine centers, it blocks off capacity when a PM has been scheduled. You can also create maintenance requests for break-fix situations — either in Business Central, in Teams, or through a Power Automate interface.

Because Maintenance Manager is built within the production module in Business Central, it works with any existing Business Central extension or capability. We’ve leveraged the production module for maintenance orders, which means if you already have tools for capturing time or managing parts in Business Central, they’ll just work with Maintenance Manager. It’s not a separate system — it slides right in, leverages what you already have, and works directly within BC. It does require a Premium license because it uses the production module.

One of the key advantages is how quickly you can get up and running. A lot of CMMS and EAM solutions are expensive to set up — not just because of software cost, but because of implementation time. If you’re on a paper-based maintenance solution, nobody wants to manually migrate all those work instructions into BC. Maintenance Manager makes it easy because we’re leveraging everything that’s already in BC. All you really need to do is attach your work instructions by dragging and dropping them in, and you can be up and running in very little time.

System Walkthrough

Let’s go into Business Central and walk through the structure of it — how it’s set up and how you would use it.

Master Data: Equipment Assets and Equipment Items

On the master data side, we have three different concepts. The first is maintenance equipment assets. These are essentially your fixed assets — you come in here and identify all the fixed assets you’re using within the maintenance module. Accounting might have a hundred fixed assets in the system, but you’re only maintaining three of them, so that’s all you see in your list. They might also have laptops and other items that I’m not responsible for. I don’t care about those.

Conversely, you might have 50 things you maintain that aren’t fixed assets. You don’t want accounting to have to create a fixed asset record just so you can calibrate a torque wrench.

That’s where maintenance equipment items come in. These are the records that define what you actually maintain. An equipment item can be tied to a machine center and also linked to a specific fixed asset if both exist in BC. Or it can have no association with a work center or fixed asset at all — for example, a Toyota forklift that just needs to be tracked as something you maintain. You don’t need a fixed asset or work center assigned to it.

The assignment quantity field shows how many maintenance tasks are assigned to a specific piece of equipment — whether that’s an outstanding break-fix or a scheduled PM task.

There are also two ways to set up equipment items from an inventory perspective. You can track a piece of equipment without any inventory association, or you can associate it with inventory. When you do that, you can use all of Business Central’s warehouse management capabilities to manage that equipment item — transfer it to a subcontract vendor, move it to a different warehouse or facility, use transfer orders, scan guns, anything you can do with standard BC inventory. You can use that same functionality for your maintenance equipment without any additional add-ins or customization.

Master Data: Maintenance Parts

Maintenance parts are simply items in BC — they work like any other item. That means you can set up all your replenishment rules: spare parts inventory, consumables like oil, min and max quantities, costing, all of it. It’s standard Business Central, so your purchasing team already knows how to manage it. As you plan maintenance into the future, the planning system in BC will automatically generate purchase orders for those parts through the planning worksheet, requisition worksheet, or the Enhanced Planning Worksheet.

From a categorization standpoint, the item usage type will be set as a maintenance part, which lets you segregate spare parts from your standard inventory for purchasing, receiving, and reporting purposes — while still following all the same rules you have set up for your other items in BC.

You can also define custom attributes for equipment items and view them hierarchically using the analysis view in BC — for example, by area of the facility, by subcontract vendor responsible for the equipment, or by how many tasks are currently assigned to each piece of equipment.

Defining Maintenance Tasks

Once you’ve set up your equipment and parts, you define the tasks — the activities you need to perform on that equipment. There are a few different maintenance types. Corrective maintenance covers break-fix situations. You can create a work request on the fly from within BC, from a handheld device, or through a Power Automate interface. If you want to expose it in Teams so people without a BC license can submit requests, or if you just want a simple webpage, that’s all possible through Power Automate.

The other major type is preventative maintenance. Let’s look at a weekly laser cutter maintenance task as an example. The interval type here is duration, meaning it recurs on a time-based schedule. You can also use runtime, output count, or distance as interval types. For equipment tied to a work center or machine center, runtime and output count are automatically updated as production activities are posted — so you always know in real time where you are relative to the next scheduled maintenance. For example, if you want to do maintenance every 10,000 pieces produced on a die or mold, the system tracks that piece count automatically through the standard manufacturing module.

You can also set an effective range on a task. If a machine requires one type of maintenance for the first 100 hours and a different type after that, you can set up two separate tasks with non-overlapping effective ranges.

A task can be assigned to multiple pieces of equipment simultaneously. If you have 10 lathes that all require the same weekly maintenance, you create one task and assign it to all 10. Each task also has a production BOM and a routing associated with it. The BOM lists the spare parts you need, and the routing defines the labor required. For production assets, there’s a maintenance placeholder in the routing setup that gets replaced with the actual work center or machine center when the maintenance order is created — so the system blocks off capacity on the right machine automatically.

Parts on the BOM can be set to back flush, so the maintenance technician doesn’t have to manually record consumption — they just mark the task complete and the material is consumed automatically. If additional parts are needed during the work, they can be added manually to the maintenance order on the fly.

Creating and Managing Maintenance Orders

Once tasks are set up and assigned, you generate work orders. The assignment quantity field gives you a quick view of what’s due — anything showing a non-zero value has maintenance due. You can then come in and select Plan Maintenance Where Due, and the system will create a recommendation to generate work orders for everything outstanding.

You can also use Auto Schedule Tasks to plan ahead. Set a date range, and the system will generate a full schedule for all duration-based tasks within that window. You’ll see weekly vehicle inspections, laser cutter maintenance, compressor maintenance — everything laid out by equipment. This schedule drives spare parts planning: if you agree with the schedule, the purchasing system in BC will automatically flag the parts you’ll need and prompt purchase orders to be created through the standard planning process.

Maintenance orders are effectively production orders in BC. They’re classified separately so maintenance personnel only see maintenance orders in their views, while standard production order lists won’t show maintenance orders unless explicitly requested. As a maintenance administrator, you see all released maintenance orders in your list.

There’s also a maintenance calendar — an Outlook-style calendar view where you can see upcoming maintenance, create new maintenance orders, and drag and drop activities to different time slots.

When you open a maintenance order, you have the standard components and routing, plus a maintenance-specific section where you can record details like the current mileage or interval reading, and flag the order as finished. When you change the status to finished in the standard BC way, it applies to the maintenance equipment record as well — updating the interval history and everything else.

You can also attach quality inspection steps to a maintenance order using either Quality Inspector or Microsoft’s Quality Management. If you need to perform a lockout inspection before working on electrical equipment, or a startup checklist after the work is done, you can manage that directly from the maintenance order.

Scheduling Maintenance Alongside Production

On the planning and scheduling side, if you’re using our MX APS tool, it will take your maintenance activities and schedule them in alongside production automatically. What often happens without this is the maintenance team says a machine needs to come down Tuesday at 8 AM, and the production team has an order starting at the same time. MX APS resolves that conflict by finding the least disruptive window for the maintenance activity. You can even define a window — say, this maintenance needs to occur within a three-day range around a target date — and MX APS will find the best available slot.

In the Graphical Scheduler, you can see all your production orders alongside maintenance orders — differentiated visually, for example by color. You can zoom in, drag and drop orders to different time slots, and click into any maintenance order to see the full details right from the schedule view.

Execution and Time Capture

For execution, you can use the standard BC interface or use Shop Floor Insight or Warehouse Insight. There’s both a kiosk interface and a personal device interface, so you can send a maintenance technician out with a tablet or phone. They see their unassigned and assigned maintenance tasks, tap or scan a barcode to pull up the work instructions, view attached manuals and equipment photos, and clock on to start capturing who did the work and when. Everything is tracked in real time in Business Central.

If you don’t use Shop Floor Insight, you can do all of the same things directly in the maintenance work order in Business Central via the mobile app. And if you already have your own solution for capturing time in production, that same solution will work for maintenance as well — because maintenance orders are just production orders in BC.

Once work is complete, you change the status to finished, all costs are posted, and if the equipment is tied to a fixed asset, those maintenance costs are tracked against it. The full history of all maintenance activities — everything consumed, every time work was done, all costs — is stored in BC using standard capabilities. Any dashboards or Power BI reporting you already have set up will work with Maintenance Manager data automatically.

Licensing and Pricing

Maintenance Manager is available from AppSource for cloud environments. For on-premises, you get it through your partner. It requires a Premium Business Central license because it leverages the production module.

There are two licensing options. The first is the Maintenance Manager User Plan, purchased directly through Microsoft on AppSource. This is a per-named-user plan at $50 per month. That user gets access to Maintenance Manager across all companies. Importantly, only the administrators of the system need this license — the people creating equipment items, maintenance parts, and tasks. Technicians recording time and materials against work orders only need their standard Business Central license. So if you have 10 techs and one supervisor, you likely only need one Maintenance Manager license.

The second option is the Pre-Purchased Maintenance Manager User Plan. This appears on AppSource at zero dollars, so Microsoft will not charge anything to your credit card — though you still need to provide one. You still get a 30-day trial, and after that trial we can extend it if needed. The purchase goes through your partner rather than through Microsoft, and the cost is $200 per month. That’s an unlimited-user license, but it’s per company.

These two options give you flexibility. If you have one user working across multiple companies, the $50 per month per-user plan likely makes more sense. If you have multiple users managing maintenance across a single company, the $200 per month unlimited-user plan is probably the better fit.

If you purchase the per-user plan through AppSource, you get one month free. There’s a checkbox to disable recurring billing — if you uncheck it, you won’t be charged after that month, though your trial will stop working at that point.

If you have questions, visit the website at dmsiworks.com — there’s a chat box there. You can also go to AppSource, click Buy Now, and start a free trial. Just turn off recurring billing and you won’t be charged anything. Try it out, see if it works for you, and go from there.

Questions and Answers

Q: How do you submit a maintenance request — is there a submission link or form?

A: There are a couple of ways. You can do it directly in Business Central. It can also be exposed in Teams using Power Automate — that’s typically the approach when you want to allow submissions without requiring a Business Central license. If you’re using Shop Floor Insight or Warehouse Insight, you can submit through those as well. If you want a simple webpage for submissions, that’s also doable through a Power Automate interface. There are also some third-party partners who have automated equipment monitoring that can automatically kick off work requests when something goes wrong with a piece of equipment, and we have integration with some of those partners.

Q: Can maintenance tasks be grouped together into a single order?

A: Not automatically through the planning process — by default, each task generates its own work order. If two tasks happen to fall due at the same time on the same piece of equipment, you’d get two separate work orders. You can manually combine them by either adding the additional steps directly onto an existing work order, or creating a new work order from scratch and adding whatever tasks and instructions you need. But when you’re doing automated planning, it’s one task per work order. One task can generate multiple work orders for different pieces of equipment or different intervals.

Q: What’s the difference between maintenance equipment assets and maintenance equipment items?

A: Assets are the fixed assets — that’s what accounting manages. The maintenance team typically has read-only access to fixed asset cards and isn’t creating or editing them. Equipment items are the maintenance team’s records. An equipment item defines what you’re actually maintaining, and optionally whether that equipment is tracked as an inventory item so you can move it around using BC’s inventory management capabilities. You don’t have to associate an equipment item with a fixed asset. Typical examples without fixed assets would be things like torque wrenches or calibration equipment — a $50 torque wrench isn’t going to have a fixed asset record, but you still might want to schedule maintenance on it.

Q: Do you need fixed assets set up to maintain equipment?

A: No. You can create an equipment item with no fixed asset and no work center or machine center associated with it. In that case, scheduling maintenance on it will have no impact on your production schedule — it just exists as a standalone record you’re tracking maintenance against. You can still assign weekly, monthly, and break-fix tasks to it without any connection to the rest of the production environment.

Q: Can you do recurring non-inventory consumables?

A: You can handle consumables through the bill of materials on a task — set them up to back flush so they’re consumed automatically every time maintenance is completed. If you want to order a fixed quantity of something on a recurring schedule without tying it to a specific work order, that would require a bit of creativity, since Business Central doesn’t have a native mechanism for reducing inventory without a work order driving it. It’s possible, but you’d need to work through the approach.

Q: Does it work with locations that have warehouse pick and warehouse receive set up?

A: Absolutely. Maintenance parts categorized as such will follow all the same rules you have set up for your other inventory in BC — picks, receives, all of it. The item usage type flags them as maintenance parts for segregation purposes, but they behave like normal inventory in every other way.

Q: Does the licensing apply across all companies?

A: It depends on which plan you’re on. The per-user plan at $50 per month gives that named user access across all companies. The pre-purchased plan at $200 per month is unlimited users but per company, so if you have multiple companies, you’d need a separate plan for each.

Q: Can you integrate with PLCs to automatically report back cycle times and counts?

A: It can be done, but it’s typically not a direct PLC-to-BC connection. The most common approach is to use OPC as the standard for device communication, feed that into an SQL database, and then have Business Central read from that database. If you already have an MES on the floor, it likely already has that capability in place, and then it becomes an integration between BC and the MES. We have some partners who have that kind of capability already built out.

Q: To clarify — is a maintenance task the same as a maintenance order?

A: Not quite. A maintenance task generates maintenance orders. The task describes the work to be done and what’s needed to do it. You assign that task to one or more pieces of equipment, and it’s the combination of the task, the equipment it’s assigned to, and the timing interval that generates work orders. For example, if you have a task for an oil change every 2,000 hours, and you assign it to five forklifts, that one task will generate five work orders when maintenance comes due — one for each forklift. The task is the template; the work orders are the execution records.