Maintenance planning in the areas of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) presents companies with a variety of challenges: from ensuring material availability and optimizing inventories to reducing downtime. With SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP), SAP offers a powerful solution that is specifically tailored to the complex requirements of MRO planning. In this blog post, you will learn how SAP IBP helps companies make their MRO processes more efficient.
What is MRO?
MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) encompasses all activities and materials necessary to keep equipment, machines, or vehicles operational—including maintenance, repair, and spare parts supply. This includes:
- Maintenance: preventive and corrective maintenance
- Repair: restoration of functionality
- Operations: ensuring operation through material availability
The goal is clear: minimize downtime and ensure maximum availability while optimizing inventories and processes.
Typical MRO process
A typical MRO process consists of the following steps:
- Technical requirement arises
- Material request is triggered
- Availability check
- Planning & procurement
- Maintenance carried out
- Feedback and review
MRO planning with SAP IBP: optimized processes
A typical MRO planning process in SAP IBP includes the following steps:
- Demand planning and segmentation: Analysis and forecasting of spare parts requirements based on historical consumption data
- Inventory planning: Optimization of inventory strategy with multi-echelon inventory optimization (MEIO) to manage inventory levels in line with demand
- Supply and capacity planning: Ensuring material availability while taking delivery times, production capacities, and priorities into account
- Financial planning: Monitoring the financial impact of planning, e.g., through budgeting and budget compliance, as well as analysis of historical and forecasted costs
With SAP IBP, MRO planning evolves from reactive bottleneck management to proactive, integrated control—for fewer downtimes, lower inventories, and greater transparency.
Challenges in MRO planning
The planning and implementation of MRO processes is often associated with the following problems:
- Long delivery times: Spare parts often have extended procurement times.
- High storage costs: Safety stocks are often kept high to avoid downtime.
- Lack of transparency: Unclear requirements and a lack of information on availability make planning difficult.
- Lack of integration: No integrated planning between maintenance, purchasing, and logistics.
Why does ERP reach its limits with MRO?
Traditional ERP systems offer basic functionality, but they reach their limits when it comes to specific MRO planning for the following reasons:
- No integrated simulation options
- Limited planning intelligence and forecasting models
- Low flexibility for planning adjustments
- Lack of user-friendliness for planners
SAP IBP for MRO addresses precisely these shortcomings and enables efficient, forward-looking, and integrated planning.
SAP IBP as a solution for MRO
SAP IBP has a specialized planning structure for MRO that offers the following advantages:
- SAP IBP provides a separate planning area for MRO use cases, specifically tailored to spare parts, tools, and consumables.
- Planning takes into account technical requirements from the maintenance process (e.g., PM orders, work orders) and compares them with supply.
- The planning area can be expanded in a modular fashion and integrated into overall planning via supply chain planning areas.
- Predefined key figures, planning objects, and logic can be used to map MRO-specific requirements, such as: Life cycle-specific consumption
- Irregular requirements
- Safety-critical parts
Functional highlights of MRO planning in SAP IBP
SAP IBP offers a variety of functions specifically designed for MRO planning:
- Spare parts forecasting: Improve demand planning with accurate forecasts.
- Inventory optimization: Reduce safety stocks and storage costs with multi-echelon inventory optimization (MEIO).
- Supply planning: Efficient planning of material flows and capacities.
- Simulation and scenario planning: Simulation options for evaluating planning alternatives and their effects
- Integration with SAP S/4HANA EAM/PM: Linking operational and strategic data
Summary: Why SAP IBP is the better choice for MRO
A comparison between traditional MRO planning and planning with SAP IBP clearly shows that conventional methods often reach their limits and are no longer sufficient to meet increasing demands.
| Traditional MRO planning | SAP IBP for MRO |
| Excel-based planning | Integrated planning platform |
| Reactive demand fulfillment | Proactive care |
| No simulation mechanism | Scenarios & Simulations |
| High inventory, low transparency | Optimized inventory strategy |
The challenges of MRO planning—such as long delivery times, high inventory levels, or lack of integration—can be efficiently overcome with SAP IBP. By combining accurate forecasts, optimized inventory strategies, and simulation capabilities, SAP IBP takes MRO planning to a new level.
