Challenge: The maintenance & planning group for an asset leasing business is tasked with the preparation of next year’s maintenance plans for a fleet of 10,000 trucks at 8 of the in-network repair shops. Traditional planning process underutilizes and misaligns their repair shop resources wasting precious dollars and leaving some valuable customers distressed. Hence, the challenge is to develop a solution that optimally allocates their FY budget towards maximizing the high priority repairs.
Solution: A prescriptive approach is presented to the customer that generates monthly repair schedules for their repair shops. PROC OPTMODEL within SAS OR is leveraged to solve the MILP formulation of the business problem which is NP-hard in nature. The custom web UI layered on top of the mathematical model(s) delivers optimal schedules in a matter of minutes and also provides the ability to the managers to the tweak and run several models, i.e., changing the input parameters and constraints such as shop capacity hours, asset repair priority, etc. Subsequently, the decision makers can utilize the available charts and graphs on the dashboard, for quick analysis and selection among the generated plans.
Outcome: The delivered solution reduces the planning effort from several weeks to a couple of hours. Benchmark tests also revealed the model improving shop utilization from 63% to 98% while reducing workforce by 16% to meet the budgeted repair goals.
