Introduction
Effective maintenance planning, scheduling, and work control are essential for improving equipment reliability, maximizing asset availability, reducing maintenance costs, minimizing unplanned downtime, and ensuring safe and efficient operations. Organizations operating in manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, utilities, mining, transportation, infrastructure, and other asset-intensive industries require structured maintenance systems to ensure that equipment, machinery, facilities, and critical assets remain operational throughout their service life.
Poor maintenance planning, inadequate work preparation, inefficient scheduling, limited coordination between maintenance and operations, and weak work order management can result in excessive equipment breakdowns, production losses, cost overruns, safety incidents, and inefficient use of maintenance resources. A systematic approach to maintenance management enables organizations to prioritize maintenance activities according to risk and operational criticality, optimize workforce utilization, manage spare parts, coordinate maintenance windows, and monitor work execution against established performance targets.
This comprehensive training course equips participants with the knowledge and practical skills required to develop, implement, and improve maintenance planning, scheduling, and work control systems. Participants will explore maintenance strategies, work identification and prioritization, work order management, job planning, resource and materials planning, preventive and predictive maintenance, maintenance scheduling, backlog management, shutdown coordination, maintenance performance measurement, and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS).
The course combines industry best practices, practical maintenance case studies, work order exercises, scheduling workshops, resource planning simulations, maintenance KPI analysis, and continuous improvement techniques. Participants will develop practical tools and strategies to strengthen maintenance execution, improve asset reliability, control maintenance expenditure, and align maintenance activities with organizational operational objectives.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- Understand the principles and strategic importance of maintenance planning, scheduling, and work control.
- Differentiate between preventive, predictive, corrective, condition-based, and reactive maintenance strategies.
- Develop structured maintenance work identification, prioritization, and work order management processes.
- Prepare detailed maintenance job plans covering labour, tools, materials, permits, procedures, and estimated work durations.
- Develop effective maintenance schedules aligned with operational requirements, asset availability, and resource capacity.
- Apply maintenance backlog management techniques to improve workflow and reduce overdue work.
- Optimize the utilization of maintenance personnel, equipment, tools, contractors, and spare parts.
- Integrate maintenance planning with procurement, stores, operations, engineering, and health and safety functions.
- Apply computerized maintenance management systems to plan, schedule, execute, and monitor maintenance work.
- Coordinate planned shutdowns, turnarounds, and major maintenance activities.
- Monitor maintenance performance using key performance indicators and management reports.
- Identify maintenance delays, recurring equipment failures, and workflow inefficiencies.
- Apply root cause analysis and continuous improvement techniques to strengthen maintenance effectiveness.
- Develop maintenance planning and work control procedures aligned with organizational objectives.
- Prepare an actionable maintenance improvement plan for enhanced reliability, productivity, safety, and cost control.
Duration
10 Days
Target Audience
This course is designed for:
- Maintenance Managers
- Maintenance Planning Managers
- Maintenance Planners
- Maintenance Schedulers
- Maintenance Supervisors
- Maintenance Engineers
- Mechanical Engineers
- Electrical Engineers
- Instrumentation and Control Engineers
- Reliability Engineers
- Asset Management Professionals
- Plant and Facilities Engineers
- Operations Managers
- Production Supervisors
- Shutdown and Turnaround Coordinators
- Work Control Coordinators
- CMMS Administrators
- Spare Parts and Inventory Controllers
- Procurement and Stores Personnel
- Workshop Supervisors
- Engineering Project Managers
- Technical Services Professionals
- Contractors and Maintenance Service Providers
- Professionals responsible for asset reliability, maintenance execution, production continuity, and operational performance.
Module 1: Fundamentals of Maintenance Management and Work Control
Maintenance Management Principles
- Role of maintenance in organizational performance
- Objectives of maintenance management
- Relationship between maintenance, reliability, and asset availability
- Maintenance costs and operational productivity
- Maintenance management policies and procedures
- Integration of maintenance with operations and engineering
- Life-cycle asset management principles
Maintenance Strategies and Approaches
- Corrective maintenance
- Preventive maintenance
- Predictive maintenance
- Condition-based maintenance
- Reactive and breakdown maintenance
- Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM)
- Risk-Based Maintenance (RBM)
- Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
- Selecting appropriate maintenance strategies for critical assets
Maintenance Work Identification and Control
- Identifying maintenance work requirements
- Work requests and defect notifications
- Work order initiation and approval
- Defining maintenance work scope
- Work order classification and coding
- Maintenance work ownership and accountability
- Work order status management
- Documentation and traceability
Asset Criticality and Maintenance Prioritization
- Asset criticality assessment
- Equipment failure consequences
- Safety, environmental, production, and financial risks
- Prioritizing maintenance requests
- Urgent, emergency, routine, and planned work
- Risk-based maintenance prioritization
- Balancing operational urgency and resource availability
Maintenance Organization and Responsibilities
- Roles of maintenance planners and schedulers
- Responsibilities of maintenance supervisors
- Operations and maintenance coordination
- Responsibilities of reliability engineers
- Contractor and service provider coordination
- Communication and reporting structures
- Maintenance governance and accountability
Practical Exercise
Participants will assess a sample industrial facility, classify maintenance work requests, evaluate asset criticality, prioritize work orders according to operational risk, and develop a basic maintenance work control procedure.
Module 2: Maintenance Work Planning, Job Preparation and Resource Management
Maintenance Work Planning Fundamentals
- Purpose and benefits of maintenance planning
- Maintenance work identification and scope definition
- Work order screening and validation
- Developing work plans and job packages
- Defining work methods and execution requirements
- Estimating job duration and labour requirements
- Identifying dependencies and work constraints
- Standardizing repetitive maintenance tasks
Job Plan Development
- Job scope and task descriptions
- Step-by-step maintenance procedures
- Labour-hour estimation
- Skills and competency requirements
- Tools and equipment requirements
- Inspection and testing requirements
- Safety precautions and quality checks
- Technical documentation and drawings
- Job plan review and approval
Materials and Spare Parts Planning
- Identifying maintenance materials
- Spare parts specifications
- Bill of materials preparation
- Inventory availability verification
- Material reservations and allocations
- Procurement lead times
- Critical spares management
- Materials staging and kitting
- Managing obsolete and unavailable parts
- Coordination with stores and procurement
Workforce and Resource Planning
- Maintenance workforce capacity assessment
- Labour availability and competency planning
- Estimating resource demand
- Allocating personnel by trade and skill
- Contractor resource planning
- Tools, equipment, and workshop capacity
- Resource loading and workload balancing
- Managing resource constraints
- Coordination with operations
Work Readiness and Job Safety Preparation
- Job readiness assessment
- Site access and work permits
- Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) requirements
- Hazard identification and risk assessment
- Job Safety Analysis (JSA)
- Confined space and working-at-height requirements, where applicable
- Environmental and operational precautions
- Coordination of simultaneous operations
- Pre-job briefings and toolbox talks
Practical Exercise
Participants will prepare a complete maintenance job plan for a selected equipment failure or preventive maintenance task. The job package will include work scope, labour estimates, required skills, tools, spare parts, safety requirements, technical references, and work readiness criteria.
Module 3: Maintenance Scheduling, Workload Optimization and Backlog Management
Maintenance Scheduling Principles
- Purpose and importance of maintenance scheduling
- Difference between maintenance planning and scheduling
- Weekly and daily maintenance schedules
- Long-range and shutdown schedules
- Scheduling horizons and planning cycles
- Work sequencing and task dependencies
- Coordination with production and operations
- Balancing planned maintenance and operational demand
Developing Maintenance Schedules
- Selecting ready-to-execute work
- Work order prioritization
- Resource availability assessment
- Labour-hour capacity calculations
- Equipment availability and access windows
- Schedule loading and levelling
- Identifying scheduling constraints
- Establishing schedule freeze periods
- Communicating and approving schedules
Workload and Resource Optimization
- Estimating available labour capacity
- Calculating effective working hours
- Matching workload to workforce capacity
- Trade-specific resource allocation
- Managing competing maintenance priorities
- Reducing idle time and work interruptions
- Coordinating multidisciplinary work teams
- Improving schedule compliance
- Managing schedule changes
Maintenance Backlog Management
- Definition and classification of maintenance backlog
- Backlog measurement and reporting
- Ready-to-schedule versus unplanned backlog
- Ageing work orders
- Identifying overdue preventive maintenance
- Backlog prioritization by risk and criticality
- Eliminating duplicate and obsolete work orders
- Developing backlog reduction strategies
- Establishing sustainable backlog targets
Shutdown and Turnaround Scheduling
- Shutdown planning and preparation
- Defining shutdown scope
- Work breakdown structures
- Task sequencing and dependencies
- Critical path scheduling
- Resource and contractor coordination
- Materials and equipment readiness
- Shutdown progress monitoring
- Managing scope changes and schedule delays
- Recommissioning and return-to-service planning
Practical Exercise
Participants will develop a weekly maintenance schedule using a sample backlog of work orders. They will allocate labour and materials, identify resource conflicts, sequence tasks, prioritize critical work, calculate schedule compliance, and propose a backlog reduction plan.
Module 4: Maintenance Work Execution, Computerized Systems and Performance Control
Maintenance Work Execution and Supervision
- Work release and authorization
- Pre-job meetings and task briefings
- Assigning work to maintenance teams
- Monitoring job progress
- Supervising maintenance activities
- Managing deviations from job plans
- Coordinating with production and operations
- Handling unplanned and emergency work
- Managing contractor performance
- Ensuring quality and safety compliance
Work Order Control and Close-Out
- Work order status updates
- Recording actual labour hours
- Recording materials consumed
- Documenting equipment defects and findings
- Recording failure codes and work history
- Technical inspection and verification
- Functional testing and return to service
- Work order completion and close-out
- Capturing lessons learned
- Improving maintenance records and traceability
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)
- CMMS principles and functionality
- Asset registers and equipment hierarchies
- Maintenance work order modules
- Preventive maintenance scheduling
- Job plans and standard work libraries
- Materials and inventory integration
- Labour and resource tracking
- Maintenance history and failure coding
- Work order workflow and approvals
- CMMS reporting and dashboards
Digital Maintenance Planning and Integration
- Integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
- Integration with procurement and inventory systems
- Mobile maintenance applications
- Digital work permits and approvals
- Condition monitoring data integration
- Digital maintenance records
- Data quality and system discipline
- CMMS master data management
- Improving system adoption and user compliance
Maintenance Performance Indicators
- Planned maintenance percentage
- Schedule compliance
- Preventive maintenance compliance
- Maintenance backlog in labour-hours
- Work order ageing
- Emergency and reactive work percentage
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Equipment availability
- Maintenance cost per asset or production unit
- Work order completion rate
- Maintenance productivity and utilization
Practical Exercise
Participants will use a sample CMMS work order register to track maintenance execution, analyse work order status, calculate selected maintenance KPIs, identify recurring delays, and develop a maintenance performance dashboard for management review.
Module 5: Reliability Improvement, Cost Control and Maintenance Excellence
Maintenance Cost Management
- Understanding maintenance cost structures
- Labour, materials, contractor, and overhead costs
- Budgeting for planned maintenance
- Forecasting maintenance expenditure
- Monitoring actual versus budgeted costs
- Cost analysis by asset and maintenance type
- Managing maintenance cost overruns
- Evaluating repair-versus-replacement decisions
- Balancing maintenance costs and operational risk
Reliability Engineering and Failure Analysis
- Reliability and maintainability principles
- Equipment failure patterns
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
- Fault tree analysis fundamentals
- Repeat failure identification
- Defect elimination
- Reliability improvement actions
- Integrating reliability findings into maintenance plans
Preventive and Predictive Maintenance Optimization
- Reviewing preventive maintenance intervals
- Eliminating ineffective maintenance tasks
- Condition monitoring strategies
- Vibration analysis applications
- Thermography and infrared inspection
- Oil and lubricant analysis
- Equipment condition data
- Predictive maintenance planning
- Integrating inspection findings into work orders
Maintenance Risk, Safety and Compliance
- Maintenance risk registers
- Safety-critical equipment maintenance
- Regulatory and statutory inspection requirements
- Environmental compliance
- Maintenance quality assurance
- Permit-to-work compliance
- Audit trails and documentation
- Contractor safety and performance
- Managing deferred maintenance risks
Continuous Improvement and Maintenance Strategy
- Maintenance maturity assessment
- Benchmarking maintenance performance
- Lean maintenance principles
- Eliminating waste in maintenance workflows
- Improving planning and scheduling processes
- Standardization of maintenance procedures
- Workforce competency development
- Maintenance digitalization and emerging technologies
- Developing a maintenance improvement roadmap
Practical Exercise
Participants will work in multidisciplinary teams to develop a comprehensive Maintenance Planning, Scheduling, and Work Control Improvement Plan for an industrial or asset-intensive organization. The plan will include maintenance workflow improvements, job planning standards, scheduling procedures, backlog management, CMMS utilization, resource optimization, performance indicators, reliability initiatives, cost control measures, and implementation priorities. Teams will present their plans for peer review and facilitator evaluation.
Training Approach
This course adopts a highly practical, interactive, and operations-focused learning approach that combines expert presentations, facilitated discussions, industrial maintenance case studies, work order planning workshops, scheduling simulations, resource allocation exercises, backlog analysis, CMMS demonstrations, maintenance KPI calculations, reliability scenarios, and group assignments. Participants will prepare maintenance job plans, develop weekly schedules, assess work readiness, optimize resource utilization, analyse maintenance performance data, and design work control procedures using realistic industrial scenarios and sample maintenance records. Emphasis is placed on applying internationally recognized maintenance management practices to real operational challenges while improving equipment reliability, maintenance productivity, schedule compliance, workforce utilization, safety, and cost effectiveness.
General Notes
Training Requirements
Participants should have a basic understanding of maintenance, engineering, operations, asset management, or industrial processes. Previous experience in maintenance planning, scheduling, supervision, or CMMS use is beneficial but not mandatory.
Training Materials
Each participant will receive a comprehensive training manual, presentation slides, maintenance planning and scheduling templates, sample work orders, job planning checklists, backlog management tools, resource planning worksheets, CMMS-related exercises, maintenance KPI templates, reliability assessment tools, and reference materials.
Certification
Participants who successfully complete the course will receive a Kincaid Development Center Certificate of Completion.
Training Venue
The course may be delivered at Kincaid Development Center’s training facilities, at the client’s premises, or through a live instructor-led virtual training platform.
Course Customization
The course can be customized to meet the maintenance management and asset reliability requirements of oil and gas companies, power utilities, manufacturing plants, mining organizations, transport and logistics companies, water utilities, engineering firms, petrochemical facilities, infrastructure operators, and other asset-intensive institutions. Organization-specific maintenance procedures, asset registers, work order data, CMMS platforms, equipment criticality assessments, workforce structures, spare parts processes, maintenance KPIs, and operational priorities can be incorporated to maximize practical relevance and application. The course can also be tailored to the specific country operating environment, industry standards, regulatory requirements, and organizational maintenance maturity.
Where appropriate, participants may work on a practical Maintenance Planning and Work Control Assessment, culminating in an actionable improvement roadmap for strengthening maintenance performance and operational reliability.