Maintenance software for sugar and ethanol mills

Inside the plant, wear concentrates where the cane travels: preparation with knives and shredder, the milling tandem with its bearings, gearboxes and headstock alignment, the boiler and pressure vessels under the mandatory inspection of Brazil's NR-13 standard, the cogeneration turbogenerator and the elevation and conveying network that moves cane and bagasse between stages. The plant runs 24 hours a day through the whole crushing season and sends the bill during the off-season.

Out in the field, the harvest fleet follows the opposite calendar. Harvesters, haul-out wagons, tractors and trucks are pushed hardest exactly while the plant is crushing, and maintenance happens in the field workshop and the tire shop, far from any terminal. The cost weight is not marginal: according to a survey published by Cana Online, fleet maintenance accounts for 24.1% of the cost of a bag of sugar, with trucks taking 30% of that spend, harvesters 23% and tractors 17.9%.

These are two routines with different crews, rhythms and locations, judged by the same availability figure and feeding the same SAP PM. When each one records in its own way, the planning team spends the week consolidating spreadsheets instead of scheduling the next one.

Between December and March a Center-South mill bills only 4% to 5% of its annual revenue, because the plant is not crushing. It is the only window in which the milling tandem and the boiler can be stripped down with the plant stopped, and it is roughly four months that have to deliver a full year of availability: knife and hammer replacement in preparation, laser alignment of headstocks and drives, inspection of piping, valves and heat exchangers, hydrostatic testing, plus the contractor packages moving in and out of the plant in a tight window.

And the window keeps shrinking. Sector press at Canal Jornal da Bioenergia reports that mills have been cutting the off-season period to expand sugar and ethanol output and meet cogeneration commitments, and that the shorter window demands more effective planning and scheduling so the start of the next season is not compromised.

Planning without scheduling does not survive that squeeze. Scope becomes a list of orders, the list has to fit the capacity of each work center week by week, and every crew has to confirm what it executed on the day it executed. Without that, real shutdown progress only shows up in the next morning meeting, when the decision to replan is already a day late.

With the mill crushing, the math changes. A report by CompreRural estimated the loss from a milling stoppage at up to R$ 1.22 million every 12 hours, and that number is what pushes the sector to defer everything that is not an emergency to the off-season. The side effect is well known: equipment reaches the shutdown more degraded than the plan assumed.

Meanwhile, maintenance keeps happening. Night-shift breakdown work on a mill roll, harvester base cutter blades that lose their edge in about eight hours of operation, field workshop rescues out in the cane. Much of that execution never becomes a record in SAP PM, or becomes one days later, typed by someone else from a handwritten note. Without that data, mechanical availability, MTBF and MTTR become estimates, and maintenance cost per ton does not match what the operation actually spent.

What is at stake in these decisions has grown. In an interview with Cana Online, consultant Dário Sodré, of D2G, sums up the shift: in 1990 a maintenance manager was responsible for around US$ 1 per ton of cane, today that responsibility reaches US$ 5 per ton, and mills already commit 26 kg of recoverable sugar per ton just to pay for maintenance, against 19 kg per ton in the recent past.

The average cost to process one ton of cane was R$ 26.24 in the 2024/25 season, and plant maintenance accounted for 30.3% of that figure, according to the Expedição Custos Cana 2025 study by Pecege, published by RPAnews. It is one of the two largest lines in the industrial cost. A line that size should not depend on re-keying spreadsheets.

The typical path is still this one: the mechanic writes the job on a paper form, the team leader consolidates it in a spreadsheet at the end of the shift, someone types it into SAP the next day and the planning team builds the indicator in a third spreadsheet. Every handoff loses detail, delays closing and creates a different version of the same fact. The shortage of qualified technicians, flagged by JornalCana as one of the sector's bottlenecks, makes it even more expensive to spend skilled hours on data entry.

The sector has been consolidating management on SAP and migrating to S/4HANA, and that is public record. Usina Coruripe completed its S/4HANA migration in 2025 with a total downtime window of only three days, according to Agro Summit, and São Martinho moved to the RISE with SAP cloud model, as reported by technology press. These are market cases, brought here as sector context, not as PM Run customers.

What an ERP migration does not solve on its own is the last meter. The order has to be executed inside the milling tandem, the confirmation happens out in the cane, and the schedule is rebuilt every week by the planning team. SAP PM remains the central record of assets, orders, costs and the preventive strategy, which is where the plan and its frequencies live. PM Run is the execution and planning layer running on top of it, so the data is born where the work happens.