Planned Maintenance (PM) Service

Before

The PM planning was done in Excel and the monthly plan was printed and placed in the workshop. During the PM execution, the worker filled out a checklist on paper, referring to the machine manufacturer's instructions. If the worker took photos during the process, they would send them to their supervisor via a messenger. The completed checklist with a list of identified malfunctions was then handed over to the operations manager.

In addition to the obvious drawbacks of using a paper-based process (such as labor-intensive data collection and analysis, the possibility of retroactive report adjustments, etc.), the customer also highlighted the following issues:

Inability to confirm that PM was actually performed (beyond just paper documentation).
Incorrect type of PM execution - weekly inspections instead of quarterly preventive maintenance.
Lack of comprehensive analytics (e.g., duration of PM and its stages).

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PM schedule

Solution

A Planned Maintenance (PM) service has been developed on the Power Platform. It consists of three parts:

A mobile application called Power Apps for the workers.
Power Apps web application for the operations manager.
Dataverse database for data storage.

The Power Apps mobile application for workers includes the following features:

PM schedule for the current shift.
Scanning of a machine's QR codes to start PM.
Preview of planned PM tasks and a list of tools and spare parts required for their completion.
Automatic selection of planned PM type based on the worker's specialization.
Checklist with photo standards for task completion.
Mandatory upload of photos for certain tasks (even if no faults are found).
Work completion timer.
Ability to pause PM (with mandatory reason specification).
Creation of work order and notification to the shift manager in case a fault cannot be resolved on-site.

The Power Apps web application for the shift manager includes the following features:

Shift schedule.
List of workers with their specializations and current shifts.
List of all machines with PM and fault history.
PM templates for each machine model, with different templates for different types of work and PPM (weekly inspection, quarterly maintenance, annual servicing).
List of all scheduled and completed PMs with change history.
List of all faults with photos and a link to the work order for resolution.
Automatic generation of a printable PDF report after PM completion.
Power BI summary report: statistics on completed PMs, shift performance, machine downtime, etc.

PM preview

Registering malfunctions during PM task

After

After implementation, the customer decided to abandon paper documents, and now the process of planning and executing PM is fully done within the service:

All PM works are fully carried out according to the established regulations.
Cases of executing the wrong PM that was scheduled have ceased.
Operations manager instantly receives notifications regarding discovered malfunctions.
Accrued history for each machine and employee.
All statistics and reports are gathered automatically.
Bigger volume of accumulated data and new metrics enable the optimization of the process.