| # Maintenance concept, prediction, and planning A maintenance concept is a non-customized maintenance plan for manufactured products or purchased products on which service is carried out. A maintenance concept consists of a list of reference activities that must be carried out on an item. You can specify material, labor, and other requirements and their related costs. If you want to specify more than one maintenance concept for an item, you can add a usage class to an item. If the items are sold, you can generate maintenance planning for a cluster, based on the maintenance concept. To generate maintenance planning directly based on a maintenance concept, you can specify the following: A frequency: The frequency indicates the number of times per unit of time a reference activity must be carried out on an item. A measurement type: The measurement type indicates when a reference activity must be carried out, based on an actual value and a predefined norm value. Maintenance planning can be created for the maintenance concept based on the pattern of the measurement type and the frequency. You can also use a maintenance concept to create a maintenance prediction and subsequently generate maintenance planning. A prediction is a fine-tuned maintenance concept for an item. In the maintenance prediction, you can define the relative moments that the reference activities must be carried out for the duration of the item's maintenance cycle. Example For example, in your maintenance concept you have decided to carry out maintenance activities on item A each month. However, item A is a large ice machine and therefore not used much during winter. In your maintenance prediction you decide to carry out maintenance on item A twice a month during summer, and once a month during winter. In addition, the maintenance cycle the maintenance prediction is also based on predicted values. The predicted values are relative values, independent of time. The expected value for the dependent variable and the value for the independent variable is calculated for the reference activity that is triggered by a measurement type. Based on the maintenance cycle, the values can be adjusted when the prediction is generated to maintenance planning. The prediction is not customized. The prediction is generated for items, not for clusters. If the items are sold, you can generate maintenance planning for a cluster, based on the prediction. Note If you define a maintenance concept for an item, this concept is used to generate maintenance planning. If you also define a prediction for this item, the prediction is used instead of the maintenance concept if you generate a maintenance planning. The prediction is generated for the top level item (parent item) of an item breakdown, and takes into account all related sublevel items (child items) that are defined in the item breakdown. However, you must define a maintenance concept for each parent item and child item. Related topics To generate maintenance planning |