This activity is used to define the MPS Cluster ID for Equipment Objects, which is used to group equipment objects based on how they function.
Most of the time, when a piece of equipment is shut down, an entire process is affected and several other pieces of equipment will need to be shut down as well. If maintenance activities can be clustered based on these equipment groups that function together, there is a good chance of reducing the number of maintenance stoppages. MPS Cluster ID is used to achieve this.
The Maintenance Planning and Scheduling (MPS) solution can be set up in a way that increases the likeliness of clustering maintenance work. This is done using the equipment grouping mechanism based on MPS Cluster IDs. The MPS Cluster ID, which can be set on the equipment object record indicates which cluster a particular equipment belongs to from a maintenance perspective. MPS Cluster ID set up on equipment objects will associate them with a group that will be affected together when any one of them requires being shut down. Using this functionality, maintenance departments can easily be shown work due, or soon to be due, on the associated equipment while production is down for a specific casualty along with the available resources to perform the work. This may save a later shut down for planned maintenance on the associated equipment thus making up the lost production time.