One requirement of aircraft maintenance is to provide a maintenance schedule that can be used to forecast the maintenance workload. This schedule is based on predicted flying rates, on the maintenance program for each airplane and airplane fleet, and on customer contracts and requests.
SAP solutions for maintenance and engineering (M&E) and for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) have the capability to provide the maintenance schedule for the near term and also for middle-term and long-term horizons. 
The maintenance lifecycle for an aircraft and its associated equipment subassemblies can be 25 years or more. The maintenance schedule tool must be able to project the maintenance program over this time period to give the airline and the maintenance organization a complete picture of the maintenance requirements. A change of fleet, a change of maintenance program, an extension of the maintenance program, a delay in the arrival of new fleets, and the introduction of new fleets all impact the maintenance organization, the facility, and required skill sets. The scheduling tool must be able to project, predict, optimize, and provide an element of what-if along with a view of available capacity that could be used as potential third-party maintenance, in order to maximize the use of the maintenance facility and its resources.
The SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning application provides a more than 10-year view by fleet, tail number, facility, bay, hard stand, and resource skill set as an optimized maintenance schedule for the airplane and its major equipment subassemblies.
SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Service Planning is part of the SAP Best Practices for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul package and is integrated into the maintenance program and maintenance planning objects in the SAP software.
The application uses the planning information in the maintenance plans to schedule the airplane and its major subassemblies against maintenance due dates, and balances available downtime (slots) with maintenance requirements to produce an optimized maintenance schedule.
This maintenance schedule provides a first view of the load on the resources at the facility level. These calculated maintenance demands can then be balanced against planned maintenance tasks and historical factors to determine the execution information, and this can then be matched against the available capacity requirements. Demand is calculated using a combination of the estimated airplane utilization, current counter values, and calculated or actual completion of last maintenance demand.
The output from SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Planning is an optimized maintenance schedule that provides a single view across the organization of the airplane visit schedule, capacity load on all key resources, and future fleet growth plans. It also has the ability to suggest possible resource bottlenecks.
Companies that use SAP Enhanced Maintenance and Planning will address a number of key industry pain points:
- Reduce the number of unnecessary maintenance downtimes of airplane assets
- Improve utilization of resources
- Reduce or stop early scheduling maintenance checks
- Remove complex planning scenarios that are manually
executed on spreadsheets - Improve the quality of information:
- Integrated or single maintenance view across the
organization - Long-term visibility into capacity required to maintain
assets
- Integrated or single maintenance view across the
- Reduce operational costs
- SAP Managed Tags:
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