IBP MRO – Current State Capability and Direction

Earlier in this blog, I shared how companies might consider their asset as a customer? Using SAP‘s latest innovations to predict, maintain and plan the spare parts inventory level. I shed the light on the global study we started with customers and my plan as I set industry best practice and co-innovate on functionality improvements in SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP), with leading customers in Asset Intensive industries.

As of today, I am thrilled to announce that the integration of SAP IBP and SAP Enterprise Asset Management (Plant Maintenance) is available. In addition to that, we offer a dedicated planning area that adheres to the Asset-intensive industry processes. This allows customers to have synchronized planning for MRO! Our strategy seeks to align and integrate the planning functions key to Asset Maintenance that have historically been performed in silos.

The 2202 release is available as of February 2, 2022 with our innovations in that space. Let’s have a look!

MRO! An Overview 

The Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) process, continuously assures that the right parts and tools needed to keep assets operating are available during the maintenance activity, and it has a big impact on both top-line performance and bottom-line costs. Businesses may not directly incorporate the countless number of parts, maintenance kits, services, and other related MRO items into any final product. Yet these maintenance spare parts are what keep factories, trains, mines, and other asset-intensive firms up and running. When spare parts for these assets aren’t readily available, the business impacts can be catastrophic, one of which is a complete freeze of the supply chain. For that reason, companies in that space focus on extending the asset lifecycle and increasing its availability and reliability.

Building on SAP’s global co-innovation initiative with +100 interested customers, we introduce IBP for MRO, an Innovation integrated end-end pathway for MRO parts planning process with SAP IBP to optimize inventory levels and increase assets availability & reliability. IBP MRO ensures customers, that they have the right spare parts, tools, and labor to do the right maintenance work at the right time and the right place. This optimization allows for assets to be readily available for producing products and fulfilling customer/asset demand in a timely and reliable manner. By integrating demand, maintenance, and supply planning, SAP is enriching the intelligent enterprise solutions.

2202 Release Highlights

The 2202 release allows capturing the demand based on the Machines/Assets maintenance plans and forecasts the parts and labor resources, leading to the financial projections. Ultimately, various planners, such as the MRO supply chain planner and the Maintenance Planner/reliability engineers, can collaborate on various scenarios to increase the Asset availability & Reliability. For instance, when there is a delay of the maintenance parts availability, SAP IBP as such highlights the source of such issues (e.g. shortages, capacity over-utilization) without restricting the Maintenance Plan, so the planner can expedite or take corrective action to avoid disruptions to planned outages or Maintenance Operations.

SAP IBP integration with SAP Enterprise Asset Management

With the integration of selected Asset Management Master Data for Maintenance, Repair , and Operations (MRO), we support various maintenance plans such as Corrective Maintenance or Preventive Maintenance plans. Regarding future Corrective Maintenance, historical consumption of components and resources are considered, and regarding future Preventive Maintenance, all maintenance plan orders are considered. This includes Rough Cut Workforce Capacity Plan and Spares Usage of Maintenance Plans.

Further, we are now offering pre-configured content to address the planning requirements of asset-intensive industries. The integration is based on extractors to import master data from SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP Plant Maintenance) into SAP IBP, enabling customers to quickly get data from plant maintenance to SAP IBP and to model MRO processes in the provided planning area. Pre-configured templates in SAP Cloud Integration for data services helps to quickly define data flows.

Projection on the maintenance labor utilization is now supported as can be seen on the screen below. Ultimately that leads to the total maintenance costs taking into consideration the MRO parts and associated labor costs.

MRO Planning Area

To simplify configuration, we’re delivering an MRO-specific planning area with configured demand forecasting method (Croston method). The supply planning operator uses Heuristics for calculating spares and labor resource requirements for medium to long-term future periods.

In that case, the MRO planning area is derived from SAPIBP1 planning area and includes a configuration to run MRO-specific Demand Planning and Supply Planning processes.  Further, the MRO planning area includes additional attributes, master data types, planning levels to support MRO relevant business processes. Note that though the MRO planning area contains Inventory Optimization configuration, this is not yet supported in SAP IBP 2202.

IBP MRO Planning Area for 2202 is shipped as a binary planning area export (zip) file. The planning area documentation steps can be found in this link.

Recap

With the 2202 release, we get the Demand, Maintenance, and Supply Plans closer together and facilitate collaboration across organizational borders. In brief, IBP MRO will use the maintenance plans as input for demand and determine the spare parts components and resource requirements to support these maintenance activities. SAP IBP will then be able to provide a projection of the component-dependent demands so buyers can proactively secure the availability of supply and agree on requirements with the suppliers. The Inventory module will then ensure the safety cover of maintenance parts is appropriate and is distributed across the network to ensure the targeted service levels are met. In addition to that, we cover projection of the labor resources needed to perform the maintenance job defined on the task list.

What’s being planned for the future?

With the 2205 Release, coming up in May, we plan to continue further enhancements into the planning area for instance to include Inventory Optimization processes for safety stock recommendations, and continue the integration content for the MRO Key Figures.

In the future, with 2205+, we continue the design of dedicated MRO capabilities for instance Rotables Planning, additional forecasting algorithms such as the Intermittent Forecast model, Integration and process enhancements with SAP Asset Performance Management and Asset Intelligence Network among many others.

Relevant Links:

• SAP Integrated Business Planning Roadmap
• SAP Note:Configuration guide for MRO Planning Area, MRO Business process
• Help Documentations: Extractors documentations, CI-DS Documentations. (Note: access available with the Release availability on 02.02.2022)
• SAP Customer Influence Portal for SAP IBP
• SAP IBP Community
• Whitepaper:SAP Predictive Spare Parts Planning for Asset-Intensive Industries
• Swiss Federal Railway
• Introduction Video by Thomas Klemm, Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Supply Chain Planning and Diaa Abdelaziz Chief Product Owner for SAP Parts Planning

Follow Diaa Abdelaziz on Twitter or LinkedIn

Note: IBP for MRO is not a separate product, it is enhancements on SAP IBP to plan MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations/Overhaul) or service/spare parts. There is no separate license material for IBP for MRO.