Solving the Maintenance Blind Spot in Dynamics 365 Business Central

About Insight Works

Hey, good afternoon or morning, everyone. This is Mark, and today I’m going to take you through exactly what it says on the screen: solving the maintenance blind spots. How do we do maintenance in Business Central? The answer might be Maintenance Manager.

The goal of today’s session is to go through a quick intro to us, talk about what Maintenance Manager is and who might need it or when you’d want to use it, and then go through how to get it if you decide it’s a good fit. This should take about 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the questions you have. As usual, if you have any questions, put them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel, and I’ll do my best to answer them as we go.

About Insight Works

We work a lot in the manufacturing and warehousing verticals. Maintenance Manager applies to both, but we’re typically focusing on the production side, so we do a lot of work in manufacturing scheduling, shop floor data collection, and similar areas. If you’re having challenges in the manufacturing area, we can almost certainly help. Any time you’re dealing with physical inventory, where you have to touch inventory physically, we can likely help with barcode scanning or tracking what you’re doing with it. That’s where we come in.

If you have questions about this, I’ll give you the links at the end, but check with your partner first. We have close to 800, maybe over 800, partners now, resellers, so chances are your Business Central partner is one of our resellers. If you have questions on pricing, they may be able to help. Otherwise, you can contact us directly and we’ll help you and your partner out.

Free Applications from Insight Works

We have over 30 applications, plus a whole range of add-ons and free apps. Here’s a high-level look at some of the free applications that are applicable in the maintenance manager world.

At the top is the Enhanced Planning Worksheet and forecasting. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. Enhanced Forecasting is really sales forecasting and doesn’t apply to maintenance, but the Planning Worksheet may apply, because it lets you plan spare parts purchases for maintenance. The Enhanced Planning Worksheet is a great tool for planning that purchasing.

The tools shown in green are what we call Power Tools. They’re more technical tools for printing and generating barcodes and working with data. A few of the free apps are especially applicable for maintenance personnel.

Graphical Scheduler is one of them. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. Because Maintenance Manager is tailored to production maintenance, this tool is great because you can see your production orders and your maintenance activities at the same time. It’s a great tool for visualizing your production or maintenance schedule, dragging and dropping activities, and creating whatever views you want to see the data you need in Business Central. We use it within Maintenance Manager for a maintenance calendar and for assignments, but typically you’ll use it to see your production orders with your maintenance mixed in.

There’s also drag-and-drop document management with Doc Extender. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. Business Central has drag and drop as well, but this one is a little easier and nicer to use. It stores documents in SharePoint in a way that’s very accessible, even if you don’t have access to the Business Central records the documents are attached to, so it makes it easy to publish or track those documents.

WMS Express is warehouse management. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. It handles scanning barcodes, picking, receiving, and inventory movements like bin movements and physical inventory. You can use it in maintenance as well if you want to pick your spare parts for your maintenance orders.

Order Ship Express is more on the outbound side, for sales, where you can do domestic parcel shipments within Business Central. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. You get discounted rates on your shipping with it as well.

Safety Logbook is a nice little tool, often used in production, but it’s also good for maintenance because it’s a way to track any event you need to log within the facility, whether that’s certifications, a spill when you’re changing oil, an injury, or any other HSE-type event. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central.

These are free primarily if you’re on the Business Central cloud version. You just go to AppSource, grab them, and away you go. If you’re on-premises, some of these are available on-prem if you have one of our other products installed as well.

Where Maintenance Manager Fits into Manufacturing

Now what we really want to talk about is where Maintenance Manager fits in. I’m going to focus on manufacturing, where we have a whole range of applications. There’s the planning side, where we plan what’s happening in manufacturing, and the scheduling side, where we schedule what we need to produce, either with the free Graphical Scheduler or with the Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, which I like to call automated production scheduling because it generates a schedule without any significant user input. If you have a lot of production orders, that’s really a must-have.

Once we’ve scheduled it, we execute it. A couple of the big tools there are Shop Floor Insight, for capturing information from the shop floor, and Quality Inspector, which you can run within Shop Floor Insight or separately to capture quality information. Once we’re done, we use our fulfillment and warehouse management tools to get the product picked and identified for shipping, and Order Ship Express for shipping.

That’s all pretty standard: we plan, we schedule, we execute, we get it out the door. But the one big thing that’s missing is that once we’ve scheduled something and we’re going to execute it, the machine goes down, or we have preventative maintenance scheduled during a block of time when we’ve got high-priority orders coming through. How do we deal with that? That’s where Maintenance Manager comes in, because it’s a big gap. We hope our equipment is one hundred percent efficient and available, but it’s often not. We have break-fix issues and planned maintenance that can dramatically affect our production schedule, and that’s where Maintenance Manager comes in.

What Maintenance Manager Does

Maintenance Manager is ideally suited for production assets, because that’s really what it was built for. It allows you to do preventative maintenance and break-fix work for your production assets, meaning your work centers and machine centers set up in Business Central. It lets you create maintenance schedules and incorporate that lack of capacity into your scheduling, whether that’s the manual scheduling you do with Graphical Scheduler, or the Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, which automatically takes maintenance activities into account when it generates the schedule.

You can also create a maintenance task for any asset, not just a production asset. It could be a QC asset, a caliper that needs to be maintained for calibration, a forklift, a crane, or even somebody’s laptop. It does not need to be a fixed asset in Business Central. It can be any equipment you want to define, from a set of calipers up to a Business Central user, and there’s a full API available as well, so it can extend out to sending an email or a Teams message.

You can create maintenance requests, too. If something goes down in the facility, or if somebody notices something might need maintenance down the road, they can create a maintenance request in a number of different ways, and any employee, any user of Business Central, can do that. If you have something like Shop Floor Insight, or if you want to use the API with Power Automate, effectively any user can create maintenance requests, and the person running Maintenance Manager, the administrator, is the one who creates the maintenance work orders.

One of the nice things about how Maintenance Manager is built is that, unlike solutions that leverage the service order capability in Business Central, we leverage the production order capability to do your maintenance. That means those maintenance orders are just like production orders, so anything you already do in Business Central works with Maintenance Manager. If you want to transfer a forklift from one facility to another, or move it around and track where it is in the warehouse or the shop, you can do that. Anything you have in Business Central already, whether that’s add-ons or customizations, will natively work with Maintenance Manager. Shop Floor Insight, for example, just works with Maintenance Manager without anything else.

The value is there’s really nothing extra to learn. You’re working in Business Central using the standard Business Central capabilities, which makes it easy to set up and use. That’s one of the big problems with CMMS, or maintenance solutions in general: everybody wants to go electronic with their maintenance programs, but it can be a big lift, because everybody’s working on paper or in Excel, and moving that information into an electronic system can be very painful. Maintenance Manager makes it easy to set up because you’re just working in Business Central. It’s not a huge lift to get everything moved over, and you can start using it right away.

Setting Up Maintenance Manager

Let’s jump into Business Central and look at how it’s put together. There are really three things you need to set up to use Maintenance Manager, and if you run the setup wizard, it will configure most of this on its own. There’s also the ability to track maintenance equipment as inventory, which is useful if you have assets you want to move around, or if you want to use warehouse management capabilities with those pieces of equipment. For example, if you have a tool you want to scan and move from one place to another, you can manage that. For the most part, though, if you run the setup wizard, it sets everything up for you.

Once that’s done, there are three things to configure: equipment items, which are what you’re going to work on; maintenance parts, your spare parts inventory for maintenance; and tasks, which are the types of preventative or corrective actions you need to perform against the equipment, and what parts those tasks will use.

Maintenance Equipment

Maintenance equipment is the set of items you can maintain. Creating one is easy: you give it an ID, a description, and possibly a serial number. You can then tie it to an existing fixed asset, a work center or machine center, or none of those. For example, one piece of equipment might be tied to both a fixed asset that accounting tracks and a specific machine center. Another, like a torque wrench, might not be tied to a work center, machine center, or fixed asset at all, because accounting has expensed it, but it’s still something that needs to be calibrated and maintained, so it’s listed as maintenance equipment.

When you link a piece of equipment to a machine center, that link is used when you plan preventative maintenance or have a break-fix work order, so the maintenance uses the capacity of that machine center during the maintenance time. When you look at your schedule in Graphical Scheduler, you’ll see the maintenance scheduled alongside production and can drag and drop it. If you’re using the Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, it looks at any maintenance planned on that equipment and schedules it in with production, choosing the time that’s least disruptive. If you have a high-priority production order and a low-priority preventative maintenance task, it might schedule the maintenance after the production order is done, or you can tell it the maintenance is higher priority, or that it just needs to happen sometime next week, and it will find a good spot, or you can force it to a specific day and time.

Each piece of equipment also has tasks associated with it, for example weekly maintenance or maintenance every half year. Maintenance can be scheduled based on duration, like every week, on runtime, or on output count. With runtime and output count, that information is pulled in automatically because we have a link to the machine center and know how long it has run, whether you enter that runtime manually or capture it through something like Shop Floor Insight. The same applies to output count. If something like a die needs maintenance after every thousand impressions, we track that and plan preventative maintenance accordingly. You can also enter the current hours or mileage manually, both on the equipment record and on a work order.

Maintenance Parts

Once your equipment is set up, you may want to set up your spare parts inventory. This is standard inventory in Business Central, segregated out because it’s flagged specifically as maintenance inventory, so someone looking at normal inventory, like components for production or finished goods, doesn’t need to see the maintenance spare parts list. It works just like any other Business Central item: you can set your replenishment, your vendor, and your min-max or reorder quantities.

If you have maintenance scheduled that will use spare parts, Business Central looks at that and lets you know when you’re going to hit your reorder point, generating a suggestion to create a purchase order. If you’re using the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, you click one button, it creates the purchase order, sends it to the vendor, and you’re done. All of that automated replenishment for spare parts is built in, and you have full history because it’s just a standard Business Central item.

You can also use the analysis view in Business Central to see your equipment in a hierarchical view, for example by facility, by subcontract vendor, or by the number of tasks associated with each piece of equipment. You can create whatever views you want to see the equipment in whatever hierarchy makes sense to you.

Maintenance Tasks

Tasks are what you’re going to perform on a piece of equipment. They aren’t work orders; they’re closer to templates for what needs to be done. There are two types: corrective tasks and preventative tasks.

Corrective tasks are ad hoc. Somebody notices a problem, for example a piece of equipment that’s broken and needs urgent attention, and creates a maintenance request. Somebody else, typically the maintenance manager, gets an alert or reviews their list of outstanding requests, decides what labor and material are needed, and creates a work order from the request, either immediately or planned for a future date. Anybody can create a maintenance request, but typically someone reviews it, maybe even takes a quick look at the equipment, before a work order is created. You can also set up Power Automate with the API to create requests, for example from a Teams message.

Preventative tasks are the ones used more regularly. These are your PMs, and they can be based on distance, like every 10,000 miles, on time, like every week, or on output or runtime hours. Each task has a status that tells you whether it’s active, meaning it will get scheduled. It also has spare parts associated with it, if any are needed, and you can set those to back-flush, so that as soon as the maintenance is performed, the inventory is automatically pulled from stock and the maintenance tech doesn’t have to do anything extra to record what was used, though they can still record material manually if needed.

Each task also has a routing that tells you what will be used to perform it. If you set it up with the maintenance placeholder, it automatically inserts the work center you’re working on when the work order is created. You can also list additional tasks that require different people, for example an electrician for one task, a crane operator for another, and a mechanic for a third, so different activities can be performed by different people, or you can assign the whole work order to a single maintenance tech. You can also list work instructions here for everything that needs to be performed for the inspection or maintenance.

Below that is the schedule itself: runtime, for example every 2,000 hours; duration, in days, weeks, or months; or distance, in miles, for vehicles. Assignments show which equipment needs this task performed. For example, if you have ten injection molding machines that all need the same maintenance, you create one task and assign it to all ten machines, so you’re maintaining a lot less data. You can add or remove pieces of equipment from a task’s assignments, or set up one task per piece of equipment if you prefer. You can also attach documents, like manuals, either to the task or to the equipment record itself.

Scheduling and Executing Maintenance Work Orders

Once tasks are set up, the next step is executing them. Each task shows how many pieces of equipment require it and which of those are currently due. For example, an oil change task might apply to three vehicles, but only one might be due based on its mileage while the other two are not. You can review exactly what’s due for maintenance as of today and use the Plan Maintenance Where Due action to review that list and create work orders for it.

You can also use the Auto Schedule Tasks action to plan further ahead. Instead of checking every day for what’s due, you can specify a date range, for example from today through the end of next month, without filtering to any specific equipment, and Business Central will plan out everything you need to do for that period in a planning worksheet. From there, you can review the suggested work and use the standard accept action message to create all the work orders at once. As soon as those work orders are created, you can start scheduling them alongside your production activities.

A maintenance work order looks like a standard Business Central document, because it uses the production module, with released, firm planned, and planned statuses for managing the workflow. You can mark a work order complete once the maintenance is done, for example entering the new mileage on a vehicle after an oil change, and Business Central updates the equipment record automatically. Each work order lists the components needed for the work, along with a maintenance block for capturing maintenance-specific activities. You can generate barcodes and work instructions on the work order as well, so a technician can use Shop Floor Insight or Warehouse Insight on a phone, tablet, or a fixed terminal at a service bay to scan and work through it.

You can assign a work order to a specific technician, and as mentioned earlier, different people can be assigned to different steps on the routing, so if one person oversees the overall maintenance and an electrician and a mechanic each handle their own steps, that can all be listed individually. If you don’t have a mobile device on the shop floor, you can enter hours and items used directly in Business Central once the work is done.

Maintenance Calendar and Graphical Scheduler

You can also use the maintenance calendar to do assignments through drag and drop, similar to Outlook. You can see maintenance scheduled over a period of days, drag it to a new time, and make assignments from that view. Since this is built on Graphical Scheduler, you can create whatever views you like, whether that’s an Outlook-style calendar or a Gantt view, and you can use it to see production activities alongside maintenance activities, with different colors for each type. You can click on a maintenance activity from the Gantt chart to open it, and if maintenance overlaps with a production activity, you can drag and drop the maintenance to a different time. If you’re using the Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, it schedules the maintenance in with production automatically, so you don’t need to drag and drop it yourself. You can tell it a task has to happen at a specific day and time, or that it just needs to be done sometime that week, and it will find a slot.

Executing Work with Shop Floor Insight

For execution, one option is Shop Floor Insight. In a kiosk-style view at a service bay, a technician signs in and sees a list of all the outstanding work in the facility. Work can be assigned to a specific individual so they only see the work assigned to them, while a maintenance manager might see all unassigned work as well as their own. The technician taps or clicks on a work order to see the documentation they need, for example a troubleshooting guide or work instructions, which can include PDFs or images dragged and dropped into Business Central. They then clock on to start the work, track their time, add comments, and consume the spare parts they need. The same capabilities are available on a phone or tablet with a slightly different interface. Maintenance Manager also supports break-fix work alongside preventative maintenance, so a technician can clock off one work order and clock on to another as priorities change.

Pre- and Post-Maintenance Inspections

A common question is what to do about pre-maintenance or post-maintenance checklists, for example certifying that equipment has been locked out before work begins, or recording that lockouts have been removed afterward. The ideal solution for that is Quality Inspector, or Microsoft’s Quality Manager, which is based on the Quality Inspector product. You can use it for inspection checklists like these, including pre- and post-maintenance checks and lockout certifications.

Pricing

Maintenance Manager is available for both on-premises and cloud deployments. If you’re on-premises, you can contact us and we’ll get it to you. It requires the premium Business Central license, because it uses the production order module. So if you’re only looking for asset maintenance and doing basic warehouse work, it’s probably not a fit, since it’s really meant for people doing production who also want the ability to add other assets, like forklifts, cars, or laptops.

For the cloud version, we use Microsoft’s marketplace purchasing mechanism rather than our own, so to get the trial, you have to buy a plan from Microsoft, though the trial itself doesn’t cost you anything. You can set it to not auto-renew, and it will never charge you. Once you’ve bought the plan, you also have to assign it to a user ID.

There are two ways to license it going forward. One is per user, through Microsoft, at fifty dollars a month per user. You could have twenty technicians across any number of facilities who do not require that license; the only people who need it are the administrators for Maintenance Manager, typically just the manager of your maintenance department. For most companies, that means you’d only need one license, for the person creating equipment records and maintenance tasks.

If you have several people doing that kind of work, you might prefer the per-company license instead, which is a fixed price of two hundred dollars and allows as many users as you like. If you have four or more people who need to create tasks and manage the system, this option is probably the better value.

Technicians using the system don’t necessarily need a Business Central license. If you want them entering information directly into Business Central, they’d need a BC license. If you’re using Shop Floor Insight or Warehouse Insight, or another vendor’s solution, they wouldn’t need a BC license or any other license, since those tools work with Maintenance Manager the same way they’d work with any other production order in Business Central.

If you have any other questions, check out the website. There are recordings and additional information there, along with a knowledge base you can get access to. If you want more information on pricing, your partner probably won’t add much beyond what’s been covered here, so if you have questions, reach out to your partner, or contact us through the website and we’ll answer them. You can also grab the free trial from AppSource and give it a try.

Thanks, everybody, for attending. Hope you have a great rest of the week and month, and hopefully we’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks, everyone.