What’s a Maintenance Planner’s role?

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A maintenance planner is responsible for determining the types of service needed for industrial equipment, obtaining necessary permits, and ensuring the availability of parts and materials. This proactive approach helps prevent unexpected failures and increase production and profits. However, employers may give them unrelated tasks, reducing their effectiveness.

A maintenance planner is an individual usually employed in industrial settings to keep machines in top condition. This job often requires technical skills and knowledge or the ability to learn about industrial equipment. Duties include determining the types of service that need to be performed on various types of machines and describing details relevant to those tasks, such as the parts and tools required for completion.

When operating an industrial facility, there are two basic options regarding equipment maintenance. This can be done as a preventative or corrective measure. A maintenance planner is an individual employed by a company that recognizes the value in preventive measures.

Maintenance planning tends to be highly recommended. This process usually involves drafting maintenance plans for equipment in a plant to help prevent unexpected failures. Doing so is believed to help increase production and profits because broken equipment can result in issues such as interrupted workflow, canceled orders, and overtime.

A maintenance planner is a professional who typically studies and is highly knowledgeable about the machines in the facility he works on. He uses this knowledge to determine the details and resources needed to keep the equipment operating optimally. He usually works closely with the maintenance planner, an individual who decides when the work should be done and the parts that should be selected to do it.

The maintenance planner usually determines what type of work needs to be done on the equipment. Equipment may not need the same type of maintenance each time it is worked on, and some types of work may need to occur much more frequently than others. For example, the maintenance planner may determine that the engine that drives a conveyor belt needs maintenance annually. He may also determine that to keep the machine running properly, the grease dispenser that lubricates the conveyor belt needs quarterly cleaning.

Your work does not stop with reaching these conclusions. He then needs to determine the parts and materials needed for these tasks. He will likely have responsibility for obtaining these items, but in some cases it may only be necessary to provide the maintenance planner with detailed information on how to obtain them.

It is also generally the duty of the maintenance planner to obtain the necessary permits for the work that needs to be performed. Although he is not the individual who must actually make the appointments, he should inform the maintenance scheduler of the types of skills that will make an individual qualified to do the work. Generally, unless a facility has more than one maintenance planner, the maintenance planner assumes these responsibilities for all equipment in a plant.

The role of a maintenance planner may seem specific, but in many cases employers have high expectations of these individuals. A problem noted with maintenance planners and their treatment by employers is that they are often given special projects or assigned tasks that are unrelated to the work they were hired to do. Many are also given the responsibilities that should belong to maintenance schedulers. When this happens, there are substantial risks that these individuals will not be as productive or effective in their primary duties as they could be and their employers will not reap the full benefits of having a proactive team member on board.




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