Weird Employer Question

I would expect that PM is preventative maintenance.

Taking on the title of maintenance planner implies to me that this job will be expected to keep a facility operational 24/7 by replacing parts before the MTBF threshold gets crossed. Notice that 24/7 operational does not mean that this facility will be operating continuously but that at anytime on any day the facility should come to life at the throw of a switch. Identify if the maintenance planner title incorporates only the electrical circuitry that a Journeyman Electrician will be responsible for or if this title will do the coordination with all of the skilled crafts to keep the building overhead functioning.

The best advice I can suggest is to go back to the guy who you don't understand and ask him to clarify what he means. All the options you will receive from the forum here will also be correct but they may not be what that guy means and since he is the one you will be working for, you should be clear on what he wants and what he wants you to do.

Good luck.

PM's or Preventative Maintenance times are planned machine outages used at regular intervals to replace parts that are approaching the end off their life so that unplanned breakdowns do not disrupt production. In order to do proper preventative maintenance and minimize production downtime it is necessary to have someone who can put together a job time line for specific tasks on that equipment. This includes knowing the parts that need to be inspected, the replacement time if necessary and coordinating the people and equipment so that all is in place to maximize the amount of work achieved in the minimum time.

A maintenance planner in my experience, is a coordinator, whose duties include:

ordering of parts, with in the constraints of the budget

processing work orders, that may have been generated by the preventive maintenance system or by variance observed by maintenance, production, quality or safety inspections.

the prioritizing of the work, especially the lower level normal replacements

in short the clerical functions of the manager or supervisor

the technical knowledge required varies

from simple clerical to full journeyman...

I think Garth (#12) and Guest (#11) had the best answers to the question and deserve GA's. As to the meaning of "PM" in the two sentence job description one could guess "Preventative Maintenance" or "Project Manager/Management" or both. I'd vote for both. I'll try to explain.......

I'm looking back here at several years in my own U.S. Navy experience as a junior CEC officer in what they called "Public Works", basically facilities engineering and maintenance. The Navy Facilities Engineering Command instituted a program called "Controlled Maintenance" at major bases and air stations in the early 1960's. Large maintenance organizations organized into departments for each of the different major building trade groups needed a centralized planning group to make most efficient use of labor and coordinate the complex jobs requiring a mix of trades people and coordination with entities outside the maintenance organizations.

The resulting "Maintenance Control" staff were planner types closely matching the job description our OP gave who relieved trades supervisors of the routine planning and scheduling of work orders. The work requests would come from outside organizations or the maintenance department's own preventive maintenance schedule charts. Depending on the type of materials required these Maintenance Planners might order materials, prepare bills of material, schedule deliveries of materials or coordinate the work of outside specialty contractors.

Maintenance control, like it's cousin Production Control in manufacturing industries, provides a better system for overall management of activities in an organization since work orders would involve estimates against which actual job performance could be compared and distribution of labor made more efficient. In addition organized and centralized planning and scheduling would enable better handling of changes and reporting to higher management and outside departments. And in the case of non-government organizations and companies a single voice dealing with city planning departments is an absolute necessity.

The idea of maintenance control can extend down to relatively small maintenance groups in small organizations where the maintenance boss begins to overload with work and needs another person in the office to do routine job planning and scheduling. Perhaps the job opening in question is one where the bulk of the maintenance work involved is electrical in nature and the maintenance boss is experienced in a different trade. In this situation the human skills that make a good supervisor can be especially helpful in the maintenance planner position. Also such a person in that position is ideally placed to train for eventual promotion to maintenance supervision. With respect to preventive maintenance it is often the case that a business often reaches the point where keeping track of the varying preventive maintenance requirement of a growing equipment list and doing that work efficiently requires a well thought out and documented plan. As mentioned in one of the above replies efficient coordination of equipment shutdown for PM can be critical to the profitability of the business.

Nowadays we have computer resources that were only a dream in the 1960's. I've been away from the world of maintenance engineering for 42 years; so I cannot recommend specific software. I have to believe there are many maintenance control software packages available to eliminate much of the grunt work involved in routine maintenance work estimating, scheduling and job order creation. So for someone looking to work in a maintenance planner position a good amount of computer literacy is probably a requirement.

Ed Weldon