Maintenance Planner

You have four technicians, two service vehicles, one crane and eight hours. Five work orders are on the board and production wants everything done yesterday. Your job is not to make the list shorter - it is to make the right calls: what is safe to defer, which job gets the crane, and what happens when the cooling pump alarms mid-shift. Every decision you make will be defended in the morning meeting, so plan like you mean it.

Maintenance planning and supervision are natural growth paths for experienced tradespeople. Strong performance supports the Industrial Mechanical and Operations paths.

• Prioritize work orders by safety, risk and production impact
• Allocate limited crews, vehicles and the crane rationally
• Respond to mid-shift disruptions without losing the plan
• Distinguish urgent work from important-but-flexible work

• Safety hazards outrank everything
• Risk to critical assets beats production inconvenience
• Preventive work is flexible - breakdowns are not
• A good plan absorbs surprises because it knows what can slip

• Order the work orders from highest to lowest priority
• Answer the allocation questions like a shift planner would
• Handle the mid-shift surprise with the resources you have
• Read the debrief explanations - they are the real lesson

• Each question is worth 10 points plus streak bonuses
• Hints cost 3 points
• Pass each level with 70% or more

Every explanation shows what a senior planner would have done and why - including when your answer was defensible but riskier.

• Working the easy jobs first instead of the dangerous ones
• Scheduling crane work without checking crane availability
• Treating preventive maintenance as optional filler
• Freezing when a surprise arrives instead of re-prioritizing