Many manufacturers keep two separate records of the same machine. One is the maintenance schedule that says when to service it. The other is the production history in Business Central that records how hard it actually ran. Both describe the identical asset, yet only one of them updates by itself. The schedule waits for a person to feed it a number.
That wait is where preventive maintenance quietly breaks. When copying a runtime figure into the schedule counts as an extra chore, it gets postponed, and the service interval slips behind real use until a machine fails in the middle of a job. The fix is not a new system. It is letting the production data Business Central already captures drive the schedule on its own.
What interval types can I set a maintenance task to track?
Maintenance Manager gives each task an interval type: runtime, output count, distance, or duration. Runtime and output count carry a Capacity Type and Capacity No., so they attach to one work center or machine center. The other two watch a raw threshold with no center attached, which is the difference: only usage-linked tasks read directly from a machine's posted activity.
Why do calendar-based maintenance schedules drift?
A calendar interval treats every week as equal, but a machine running one shift in a slow month and three shifts during a rush accumulates wear at very different rates. The fixed date then arrives too early on the quiet asset, wasting labor and parts, and too late on the busy one, after wear has already caused a breakdown.
How does posting a production order update the interval without manual entry?
The interval moves on the same posting your team already does to close a job, so accuracy becomes a side effect of normal work rather than a second task. A run finished at 2 a.m. on a night shift advances the machine's interval before the day crew arrives, and no one keys the number in twice.
What happens once an interval reaches its threshold?
Once usage crosses the threshold, the task flags as due. You can handle it alone, or run auto-scheduling across a date range, say every task due before a planned shutdown week, and drop the resulting orders into the planning worksheet in one pass. Each order shows the scheduled threshold beside the actual value that tripped it.
Does a generated maintenance order affect my capacity planning?
Yes, by design. Maintenance Manager writes each maintenance order as a production order, so it draws capacity from the equipment's work center exactly as a customer job would. Any scheduling tool reading that capacity sees the service window as booked time, which keeps the machine from being planned for production and maintenance in the same hours.
Why isn't the usage data already in Business Central driving my service schedule?
The numbers exist, but nothing wires them to the schedule by default. Runtime posts against production orders while service intervals sit in their own list. A spreadsheet updated after every run is a hand-copied mirror of figures already recorded, which is the tell that the two records never learned to talk. Linking them retires the copy and the reconciliation.
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