Managing the Airline’s Maintenance Schedule – The Interactive Planning Board

Introducing the Planning Board within SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning

In the two previous blogs in this serious Maintenance Scheduling for Airlines with SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning and Simulating Maintenance and Service Plans for Airlines we introduced you to SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning and to its simulation capabilities. In this blog I would like to introduce you to the Maintenance and Service Planning

The planning board is a configurable graphical planning interface. You use the maintenance and service planning board to:

• Graphically represent the planning situation
  You can graphically display aspects of planning in the charts of the maintenance and service planning board: The planning board consists of up to three charts arranged over one another. The three charts represent a service area view, an object view, and a resource view.

• Execute an automated planning run
  In the automated planning run, you can execute a net change plan to update an existing plan or a new plan to delete an existing plan and replace it with new planning data.

• Interactively solve planning problems or plan important maintenance demands and one-time demands
  You can perform Interactive Planning in the maintenance and service planning board to solve planning problems that arose in the automated planning run, or if you have important demands or one-time demands that you want to plan manually.

• Perform planning simulations
  You can perform simulative planning to view different versions and options of a given situation without changing the active planning version. For more details about simulative planning, see Simulative Planning with Easy Simulation.

When you start the planning board, you can specify whether you want to see the maintenance schedule only for specific aircrafts, for a specific sub-fleet or for the entire fleet. Instead of specifying the aircrafts to be selected, you can also select a specific location/facility you are responsible for. In both cases a thorough authorisation concept ensures that each planner can only access what he is entitled to access.

In the background the solution compiles the current plan for the selected objects and updates due dates for maintenance demands based on the latest aircraft utilisation data as well as the latest maintenance completion information coming from maintenance operations. The system graphically displays the compiled and updated plan to you.

Figure 1: Interactive Planning Board for SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning

The planning information is visualized in the planning board using 4 distinct screen areas:

• Navigator: Hierarchical view consisting of all selected planning objects which are graphically displayed in the different chart areas.

• Service Area chart: Visualisation of maintenance demands, scheduled slots and assigned work packages per maintenance location as a Gantt chart.

• Object chart: Visualisation of scheduled slots per aircraft as a Gantt chart.

• Resource chart: Visualisation of the resource load over time. The chart differentiates between available, used, and overload capacity.

The automated planning run can handle the scheduling of the mid-term to long-term demands. This allows the forward planner can focus on managing scheduling conflicts, which couldn’t automatically be resolved, on one-time demands and on changes to the short-term plan, which require subsequent interaction of the forward planner with airline operations.

The Maintenance and Service Planning Board within SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning is tightly integrated with SAP ERP where the short term maintenance planning and scheduling will take place prior to maintenance execution. Actual aircraft utilisation as well as actual completion of maintenance work packages are fed back to SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning to provide the solution with up to date planning data.

If you are interested to learn more how SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning can help you, please have a look at our short video product tour.

You find more information about our solution portfolio for Airlines in the SAP Solution Explorer