Maintenance and Reliability Planning Manager

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, develop, and performance-manage the maintenance planning team.
• Establish clear expectations and build a culture centered on accountability, safety, continuous learning, and reliable execution.
• Develop planner capabilities through training, mentoring, skills matrices, cross-training, and stretch assignments.
• Serve as a key escalation point for maintenance planning, scheduling, and work-management decisions.
• Own and continuously improve the Work Order Management process from initial notification through planning, kitting, scheduling, execution feedback, and closeout.
• Ensure effective preparation of daily work orders, preventive maintenance activities, line-focused schedules, weekend work, and outage work.
• Develop detailed maintenance job plans and task lists that include labor estimates, parts, materials, tools, safety requirements, procedures, and sequenced work steps.
• Lead long-range scheduling and optimization of preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance activities.
• Coordinate detailed maintenance work packages for major outages and weekend work.
• Facilitate weekly planning and scheduling meetings with Operations and Maintenance leadership.
• Improve key maintenance performance indicators, including planned-work percentage, schedule compliance, backlog health, MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.
• Own the accuracy and integrity of SAP Plant Maintenance master data, including equipment BOMs, task lists, measuring points, and maintenance plans.
• Develop and continuously improve equipment-specific preventive maintenance task lists.
• Establish and manage a formal preventive maintenance audit process to evaluate work quality, accuracy, relevance, and completeness.
• Identify opportunities to transition appropriate time-based preventive maintenance activities to predictive and condition-based maintenance strategies.
• Analyze equipment performance, failure modes, downtime trends, and recurring issues using reliability data and Pareto analysis.
• Apply FMEA, root-cause analysis, and other reliability methodologies to identify equipment risks and improve maintenance strategies.
• Expand predictive maintenance capabilities using technologies such as vibration analysis, infrared thermography, oil analysis, and ultrasound.
• Develop and maintain Power BI dashboards and advanced Excel models for maintenance KPIs, equipment health, resource utilization, and reliability performance.
• Support automated production machinery, packaging equipment, process systems, and plant utilities.
• Identify critical spare parts and components while maintaining accurate equipment Bills of Material.
• Partner with Operations, Maintenance Execution, Reliability Engineering, Engineering, and Quality teams to align maintenance priorities with plant needs.
• Incorporate personnel safety and product-safety requirements into maintenance plans and schedules, including LOTO, confined-space, hot-work, and GMP requirements.
• Support corrective and preventive actions, audit readiness, maintenance documentation, and equipment-integrity requirements.
• Champion Continuous Improvement, 5S, Lean, and Reliability-Centered Maintenance principles.
• Monitor planning-related costs, spare-parts inventory health, maintenance forecasts, and cost-reduction opportunities.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in industrial maintenance, maintenance planning, or reliability within a manufacturing environment.
• 3+ years of direct leadership or supervisory experience managing maintenance planners, technicians, or comparable technical teams.
• Expert-level proficiency with SAP Plant Maintenance (SAP PM) or a comparable enterprise CMMS.
• Strong knowledge of work orders, maintenance notifications, task lists, maintenance plans, equipment BOMs, master data, and maintenance reporting.
• Demonstrated experience improving maintenance and equipment reliability performance, including MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.
• Demonstrated success increasing planned maintenance and reducing reactive or unplanned maintenance.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel capabilities, including PivotTables, Power Query, complex formulas, and data modeling.
• Strong Power BI skills with experience developing dashboards and analyzing maintenance and reliability data.
• Strong understanding of maintenance KPIs, including planned maintenance percentage, schedule compliance, backlog health, MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.

Preferences

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Reliability Engineering, or another related technical discipline; equivalent combinations of education and extensive relevant experience will also be considered.
• Experience in food, beverage, consumer products, process manufacturing, or another highly automated manufacturing environment.
• Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP) certification.
• Experience implementing, developing, or significantly expanding predictive and condition-based maintenance programs.
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt certification.
• Formal Continuous Improvement or Lean training.
• Hands-on familiarity with vibration analysis, infrared thermography, oil analysis, ultrasound, and related condition-monitoring technologies.
• Experience building reliability dashboards, maintenance analytics, and KPI reporting used to drive operational decisions.

Titles Encouraged to Apply

• Maintenance Planning Manager
• Reliability Manager
• Maintenance & Reliability Manager
• Maintenance Manager
• Reliability Engineering Manager
• Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Manager
• Senior Maintenance Planner

The Opportunity