Paint Maintenance Planner

The Role

The Paint Maintenance Planner coordinates and prepares maintenance work to ensure paint department equipment and facilities operate safely, reliably, and efficiently. This role develops job plans, schedules planned work, improves preventive-maintenance effectiveness, coordinates parts and resources, and supports maintenance leadership with accurate work-order information and performance reporting. The planner works closely with maintenance group leaders, skilled trades, operations, manufacturing engineering, safety, quality, purchasing, stores, suppliers, and contractors. The role helps convert equipment needs into executable work that improves safety, uptime, throughput, quality, cost, and environmental performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Review maintenance requests, equipment issues, inspection findings, and preventive-maintenance requirements for the paint department.
• Develop complete work packages defining scope, sequence, labor requirements, skills, tools, materials, permits, safety controls, and estimated duration for planned work.
• Create, update, and monitor work orders, job plans, preventive-maintenance tasks, routes, and equipment records in the computerized maintenance-management system.
• Prioritize maintenance work with department leadership based on safety, regulatory requirements, equipment criticality, production impact, quality risk, and available resources.
• Coordinate daily and weekly maintenance planning with maintenance group leaders, skilled trades, operations, manufacturing engineering, and other affected departments.
• Plan shutdown, weekend, outage, and major repair activities, including work sequencing, contractor coordination, material readiness, and schedule tracking.
• Confirm that required parts, tools, equipment, drawings, procedures, permits, and technical support are available before work is scheduled.
• Partner with stores and purchasing to identify replacement parts, establish appropriate stocking levels, resolve material shortages, and support point-of-use availability.
• Review equipment history, recurring failures, backlog, downtime, preventive-maintenance compliance, and other maintenance data to identify improvement opportunities.
• Support root-cause investigations and develop corrective actions to reduce repeat failures and improve equipment reliability.
• Coordinate with suppliers and contractors on estimates, scope, site access, safety requirements, work execution, and closeout documentation.
• Support maintenance work involving paint process equipment, conveyors, robots, pumps, fans, ovens, booths, pretreatment, electrocoat, sealer, material systems, utilities, controls, and environmental equipment.
• Verify that completed work orders contain accurate labor, parts, failure information, follow-up actions, and technical documentation.
• Maintain current equipment records, bills of material, preventive-maintenance procedures, inspection routes, drawings, manuals, and maintenance standards.
• Participate in maintenance priority meetings, shutdown reviews, equipment buyoffs, reliability reviews, and continuous-improvement activities.
• Support safe work planning, including lockout, energy-control requirements, confined-space or hot-work planning when applicable, pre-task planning, and required permits.
• Prepare and communicate maintenance schedules, backlog reports, project updates, risks, and completion status to department leadership.
• Help develop and maintain standardized work for maintenance planning and improve the quality, timeliness, and execution of planned work.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Experience in maintenance, maintenance planning, scheduling, manufacturing engineering, facilities, or industrial operations.
• Working knowledge of preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, corrective maintenance, work-order management, and equipment reliability practices.
• Ability to read and interpret equipment manuals, maintenance procedures, technical drawings, electrical schematics, and bills of material.
• Ability to work effectively with skilled trades, maintenance leadership, production, engineering, suppliers, and contractors.
• Strong organization, prioritization, communication, and follow-through skills.
• Commitment to safe work practices, environmental compliance, and continuous improvement.
• Experience using Microsoft Office, maintenance reporting tools, equipment history, downtime data, or dashboard applications.
• Technical experience with mechanical, electrical, controls, pipefitting, millwright, or industrial equipment systems.

Qualifications (Preferred)

• Associate or bachelor’s degree in engineering, maintenance, manufacturing, industrial technology, or a related field.
• Experience in an automotive manufacturing or paint shop environment.
• Experience planning maintenance for conveyors, pumps, motors, drives, ovens, booths, robots, process systems, utilities, or environmental equipment.
• Experience with Maximo or another computerized maintenance-management system, including work-order reporting, job plans, preventive-maintenance schedules, asset records, and bills of material.
• Knowledge of maintenance shutdown planning, contractor management, equipment buyoffs, and production-support activities.
• Familiarity with reliability-centered maintenance, total productive maintenance, failure-mode analysis, root-cause problem solving, and lean manufacturing.
• Knowledge of lockout, energy-control requirements, pre-task planning, hazard recognition, and plant safety systems.
• Ability to develop clear job plans and estimate labor, materials, tools, equipment, and work duration.
• Experience using a computerized maintenance-management system or comparable work-order system.
• Ability to manage UAW employees.