Plant managers sabotage their planners
Key Highlights
- Surface metrics (PM/schedule compliance) hide inefficiencies; measure planned labor %, job quality, and execution effectiveness.
- Planners need dedicated roles and training; pulling them into reactive work destroys long-term maintenance performance.
- Fixing planning is a leadership issue; protect planner time, define outputs, and enforce accountability across production and maintenance.
In Tuesday's meeting, you reviewed last week's maintenance numbers. Schedule compliance at 88%. PM compliance at 92%. Nothing flagged, so you moved on, even though reactive downtime was high that same week. Therein lies the problem.
Those numbers tell you tasks were completed. Not the percentage of your available workforce that was on the schedule, whether technicians had precision instructions in hand, or the hours lost searching for parts that should have been staged in advance. Not if it was the right work, done correctly, or executed with efficiency.
Most plant managers are making decisions based on incomplete metrics, and at worst, actively misleading ones. The function most responsible for that gap gets the least attention at the leadership level, and that function is maintenance planning. I'd wager you haven't thought seriously about how that role impacts your bottom line since you last approved the headcount.
Those who plan the work should not be pulled into doing the work
Planning the work requires a different skill set than doing the work. It requires systems thinking, documentation discipline, cross-functional communication, and an understanding of how precision standard work builds organizational capability over time. Yet we often hand this role to the best available technician or, in some cases, to someone from the outside because nobody inside would take the pay cut and expect results.
For example, at a plant I visited last week, the maintenance metrics looked solid on the surface. Management seemed confident until I dug deeper. Only about 25% of available labor was scheduled, mostly for PM days. Following the PMs, lines were slow to restart, often due to self-induced errors. I checked for corrective job plans and precision PM checklists. Some existed, but they never made it to the floor, and they weren't written with precision task specifications.
That site is like most others. A person inherited tribal knowledge and a CMMS login and was knighted the maintenance planner. No formal development, no coaching, no defined outputs, no job plan templates. Just the knowledge passed from one untrained planner to the next, because it was the way they had always done it.
Only about 10% of planners are truly planning maintenance work. The rest are doing everything else, chasing parts, coordinating contractors, managing emergencies, and fielding production calls. When a line goes down, the planner's radio lights up. Job plans get set aside. The schedule gets abandoned. And the one function that could systematically reduce reactive chaos is sacrificed daily to manage the reactive chaos it was designed to prevent.
In a well-run operation, planned and scheduled work accounts for 90% or more of available labor hours. That number is under 60% in many plants, sometimes far less. That gap is recoverable labor capacity bleeding out of your operation every shift. Plants that consistently perform their planning function recover 30 to 50 percent of maintenance labor capacity. That can address excessive overtime, cost overruns, and technician attrition, too.
Healing a broken planning function starts with senior plant leadership, not mid-level management
Reactive work is urgent and visible. Planning is neither. When choosing between fighting the fire and building next week's schedule, the fire wins every time. Leadership sees the planner responding to emergencies and assumes the planner is doing their job. Meanwhile, precision job plans never get built, the schedule stays a list, and the costs keep climbing. The inefficiencies demand more bodies to stay even.
The maintenance manager cannot fix this alone because the conditions that broke the planning function were set above their pay grade. When production demands that the planner source emergency parts, the planner complies because no one with authority has said that doing so has a cost. When there is no budget for training, no protected time for job plan development, and no expectation that the function produces anything beyond a list.
That is a culture problem from the top. Plant leadership are the only people in the building with the authority to define what planning produces, protect the planner's time, and hold both maintenance and production accountable for treating that function as the strategic asset it is.
In another plant, a chemical plant, once we educated and coached the organization on effective work execution, they returned $1.8 million to the plant budget in the first year. Not from a technology investment. Not from adding headcount. From getting the planning function right.
In conclusion
Humor me. Walk into your maintenance manager's office and ask two questions: Can you show me three detailed job plans developed this week? Can you show me next week’s schedule with labor hours for each day? Not a work order. A detailed reusable job plan with craft hours, a parts list, and step-by-step precision task instructions that a new technician can execute.
The planning function is the linchpin. Every dollar you spend on maintenance labor flows through it, either efficiently or not. Right now, the odds are it's not.
About the Author
Jeff Shiver
Founder and managing principal at People and Processes, Inc.
Jeff Shiver CMRP is a founder and managing principal at People and Processes, Inc. Jeff guides people to achieve success in maintenance and reliability practices using common sense approaches. Visit his website www.PeopleandProcesses.com, and contact him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jeffshiver or via email at [email protected].