Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Fundamentals Training Course

Course overview

Maintenance work loses value when jobs enter the weekly schedule without clear scope, labour estimates, material availability, access requirements, or agreed priorities. The result is familiar: technicians spend time waiting for permits or spares, emergency work displaces planned jobs, backlog grows without useful visibility, and shutdown windows are consumed by avoidable coordination failures. This course equips maintenance professionals to build a reliable planning and scheduling process that converts approved work requests into executable work packages and realistic weekly schedules.

Participants learn the distinct responsibilities of planners, schedulers, supervisors, operations representatives, and stores personnel; how to define job plans, estimate labour hours, identify task dependencies, reserve materials, and prepare work packs. The course applies backlog management, work-order prioritisation, ready-to-schedule criteria, weekly scheduling, frozen schedule control, and schedule compliance analysis. Participants also use practical planning metrics, including wrench time, planned work percentage, backlog weeks, break-in work, schedule attainment, and PM compliance, to identify where process discipline is failing.

Instructor-led sessions are reinforced through a plant-based case study in which participants plan and schedule maintenance for rotating equipment, utilities, and production assets. Working with sample work orders, asset histories, labour calendars, material lead times, and permit constraints, participants create job plans, backlog reports, a resource-loaded weekly schedule, and a planning improvement action plan. They leave with a reusable maintenance planning and scheduling workbook containing templates, decision rules, KPI definitions, and a 90-day implementation roadmap suitable for adapting to their own CMMS environment.

The course is designed for professionals who already work around maintenance execution or asset management and need a disciplined, shared method for improving planned work delivery. It is equally valuable to managers seeking better schedule reliability, stronger supervisor-planner coordination, and more defensible maintenance resource decisions.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Differentiate the planner, scheduler, supervisor, operations, and stores roles using a maintenance workflow and RACI matrix
• Build executable job plans with task steps, craft hours, skills, tools, materials, permits, and acceptance criteria
• Classify work orders with priority codes, asset criticality, work types, and ready-to-schedule status
• Calculate backlog weeks, planned work percentage, schedule compliance, break-in work, and PM compliance indicators
• Estimate labour durations and crew capacity using standard job times, productivity assumptions, and available-hour calculations
• Create a resource-loaded weekly maintenance schedule that accounts for dependencies, access windows, materials, and permits
• Apply frozen-schedule and break-in-work controls to manage urgent work without losing schedule discipline
• Produce a 90-day maintenance planning and scheduling improvement plan with KPI baselines, owners, and review routines

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Maintenance Planners — who must convert work requests into complete, executable job packages
• Maintenance Supervisors — who need realistic weekly schedules and clearer control of crew capacity
• Maintenance Schedulers — who coordinate labour, production windows, permits, and material readiness
• Reliability Engineers — who need planning data and work-order feedback to improve asset strategies
• Maintenance Engineers — who prepare technical scopes and need work to be executed predictably
• Operations or Production Coordinators — who negotiate equipment access and manage maintenance impacts on output

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical exposure to maintenance work orders, preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, shutdown or weekly planning meetings, or maintenance supervision. Familiarity with common CMMS fields such as work order status, asset or equipment number, priority, labour hours, and material reservation is useful. Participants should be comfortable reading simple maintenance schedules and performing basic arithmetic in Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool. Prior use of SAP, IBM Maximo, or Microsoft Project is helpful but not required. This is a fundamentals course: no reliability certification, advanced project scheduling expertise, or prior experience building job plans is required.

Training methodology

The course combines focused instructor-led explanation with a continuous maintenance planning case study. Participants analyse sample CMMS work orders, reject poorly defined requests, build job plans, calculate crew capacity, and sequence work against operational access windows. Small-group workshops simulate the weekly scheduling meeting, including priority conflicts, material shortages, permit constraints, and break-in work. The instructor reviews completed schedules against defined KPIs and facilitation questions. On the final day, each participant adapts the course templates into a 90-day application plan for their site or department.

Course outline

Day 1: Maintenance planning foundations and work control

• Maintenance work management lifecycle from request to close-out
• Planner, scheduler, supervisor, operations, and stores accountabilities
• Reactive, corrective, preventive, predictive, and project work classifications
• Asset criticality and consequence-based work-order prioritisation
• Work-order status codes and workflow gates
• Ready-to-plan and ready-to-schedule entry criteria
• Maintenance backlog categories and backlog age analysis

Workshop: Participants map their current work-control process and create a RACI matrix plus ready-to-schedule checklist for a sample plant.

Day 2: Job planning and executable work packages

• Work-order scope clarification and field verification
• Job plan task sequencing and task-level duration estimates
• Craft, skill, crew-size, and labour-hour estimation
• Bill of materials development and material reservation controls
• Special tools, lifting plans, drawings, and technical references
• Permit-to-work, isolation, safety, and access requirements
• Standard job plans and feedback-driven plan improvement

Workshop: Participants convert an incomplete pump repair request into an executable job plan and work pack with labour, material, permit, and tool requirements.

Day 3: Backlog management and resource capacity

• Backlog cleansing and duplicate work-order removal
• Backlog weeks calculation by craft and priority
• Available labour-hour calculation and productive capacity assumptions
• Planned work percentage and wrench-time relationships
• Priority ranking using risk, production impact, and due dates
• Long-range planning horizons and shutdown work preparation
• Material lead-time risk and kitting readiness reviews

Workshop: Participants analyse a multi-craft backlog, calculate backlog weeks, and recommend which work orders should be planned, deferred, or escalated.

Day 4: Weekly scheduling and schedule control

• Weekly scheduling cycle and schedule freeze timing
• Resource-loaded schedule construction by craft and shift
• Task dependencies, production windows, and equipment availability
• Schedule loading targets and capacity balancing
• Daily coordination meetings and supervisor handover controls
• Break-in work criteria and emergency-work escalation
• Schedule compliance, schedule attainment, and reasons-for-variance coding

Workshop: Participants conduct a simulated weekly scheduling meeting and produce a frozen, resource-loaded schedule for a constrained operating week.

Day 5: Performance management and implementation

• Maintenance planning and scheduling KPI definitions
• Planned versus unplanned work reporting
• PM compliance and overdue maintenance analysis
• Root-cause analysis of schedule failures
• CMMS data-quality controls for work-order history
• Weekly performance review meeting structure
• Ninety-day planning and scheduling implementation roadmap

Workshop: Participants review case-study performance data, identify process failure points, and present a 90-day improvement plan with owners, measures, and review dates.

Tools & standards covered

IBM Maximo, SAP S/4HANA Asset Management, Microsoft Project, ISO 55000

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions