Maintenance
Keeping work centers running — reactive and preventive maintenance dispatches.
Maintenance in Carbon keeps the machines on the floor running. The unit of work is a dispatch — a work-order-like record raised against a work center, either reactively when something breaks or on a recurring preventive schedule. Execution happens on the floor in MES; authoring and reporting live in the back office under Resources.
Dispatches
A maintenance dispatch is one job of upkeep: what's wrong, which work center, who's on it, and the time and parts it took. It moves through a short lifecycle:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | Raised, not yet picked up. |
| Assigned | Given to someone. |
| In Progress | Being worked, with the clock running. |
| Completed | Done — any running time entries are closed automatically. |
| Cancelled | Dropped without completing. |
Every dispatch carries a priority (Low, Medium, High, Critical) and a source that says where it came from: Reactive (a breakdown — the default), Scheduled (generated from a preventive schedule), or Non-Conformance (raised from a quality issue). Time is tracked as events against the dispatch, and parts as dispatch items.
What it's against
A dispatch is attached to a work center and its location — the machine being maintained.
Maintenance targets a work center, not a fixed asset or an equipment record. The same physical machine may also be a depreciable fixed asset, but Carbon keeps those independent — maintenance is about keeping the production resource available, not about the asset's book value.
Preventive schedules
Recurring upkeep is defined as a maintenance schedule: a work center, a frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annual), the parts it needs, and how far in advance to raise the work. A daily background job reads the active schedules and, when one is due within the advance window, generates an Open dispatch — tagged Scheduled and Preventive, with the schedule's parts copied onto it. Daily schedules honor per-weekday flags and can skip holidays.
Blocking and OEE impact
Each dispatch declares its OEE impact — Down, Planned, Impact, or No Impact. This is an availability gate, not a metric.
A dispatch marked Down or Planned blocks its work center: on the floor, a blocked work center cannot start a production operation until the maintenance clears. There is no OEE percentage or uptime ratio in Carbon — the impact value exists to gate work, not to score it. Maintenance analytics are reliability KPIs (MTTR, MTBF, spare-part cost) computed from dispatch event durations.
Material and cost
Parts used in maintenance are issued from inventory, drawing stock down through the item ledger as a Maintenance Consumption movement.
Maintenance material is an inventory movement only — it posts to the item ledger but writes no general-ledger entry, regardless of whether accounting is enabled. It reduces what's on hand; it doesn't hit the books.