Key Working Relationships (Non-Supervisory):

• Electrical Engineer
• Refrigeration Engineer
• Draughtsman
• Fleet Coordinator
• Technicians / Mechanics
• Procurement / Stores
• External Contractors & Service Providers
• Finance / Accounts

Job purpose:

The Maintenance Planner is the operational backbone of the entire maintenance function, responsible for developing, managing, and continuously improving the organization’s maintenance planning system across all asset classes — including the heavy goods vehicle fleet, refrigeration equipment, electrical systems, workshop plant, and facility infrastructure. Reporting to the Maintenance Manager, this role transforms maintenance strategy into a structured, measurable, and executable plan that maximizes asset reliability, minimizes unplanned downtime, and controls maintenance costs.

Using the organization’s Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) as the central tool, the Maintenance Planner develops and maintains preventive maintenance schedules, manages work order workflows, coordinates resources across the maintenance team, plans and schedules shutdowns, tracks spare parts requirements, and produces the maintenance performance dashboards that enable the Maintenance Manager and Operations Director to make informed asset management decisions.

This is a planning and coordination role that sits at the intersection of engineering, operations, procurement, and finance. The Maintenance Planner does not carry out hands-on maintenance work but is the architect of the system with in which all maintenance activity occurs — ensuring the right work is done on the right assets, by the right people, with the right materials, at the right time, and within the approved budget.

Key Responsibilities:

Maintenance Planning & Scheduling

• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve the Master Maintenance Plan covering all assets — HGV fleet, refrigeration units, electrical systems, workshop equipment, and facility infrastructure — aligned to manufacturer service intervals, operational requirements, and reliability data.
• Produce weekly and monthly maintenance schedules, allocating tasks to the appropriate maintenance personnel (mechanics, electrical engineer, refrigeration engineer) based on skill requirements, workload, and asset criticality.
• Coordinate maintenance scheduling with the Fleet Coordinator to ensure vehicle preventive maintenance is planned around operational dispatch requirements, minimizing fleet availability impact.
• Manage the work order lifecycle from creation through to closure — ensuring all work orders are correctly prioritized (critical, urgent, routine), resourced, executed, and closed with full data capture in the CMMS.
• Develop and maintain asset criticality rankings to guide maintenance prioritization, ensuring critical assets (reefer units, prime movers, electrical distribution) receive appropriate maintenance priority and resource allocation.

Shutdown & Outage Planning

• Plan and manage all planned maintenance shutdowns and major service outages — developing detailed shutdown work packs including task lists, resource plans, material lists, contractor scopes, and safety requirements.
• Conduct pre-shutdown planning meetings with the maintenance team, Fleet Coordinator, and operations to confirm scope, resources, timelines, and operational impact mitigation.
• Monitor and track shutdown execution in real time, identifying schedule slippages early and re-sequencing work to recover the plan where possible.
• Conduct post-shutdown reviews to capture lessons learned, measure performance against plan, and improve future shutdown planning.

Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) Administration

• Serve as the organization’s CMMS administrator — maintaining the asset register, work order templates, preventive maintenance triggers, spare parts catalogue linkages, and user access configurations.
• Ensure data integrity within the CMMS: all completed work orders are closed with actual hours, materials used, fault descriptions, and root cause codes before month-end.
• Generate and distribute standard CMMS reports — work order status, backlog analysis, PMS compliance, cost-per-asset, and MTBF/MTTR trends — to the Maintenance Manager and relevant stakeholders.
• Train maintenance personnel on CMMS usage, work order processes, and data entry requirements to maximize system adoption and data quality across the team.

Spare Parts & Materials Planning

• Derive advance materials requirements from the maintenance plan and communicate planned consumption forecasts to procurement and stores in sufficient time to ensure parts availability before scheduled maintenance.
• Maintain critical spare parts lists for all key assets, recommending appropriate stock levels based on lead times, failure frequency, and operational criticality.
• Coordinate with procurement on long-lead-time spare parts — particularly for specialist refrigeration components, electrical switchgear, and HGV drivetrain parts — to prevent unplanned downtime due to parts unavailability.
• Analyze spare parts consumption data from the CMMS to identify fast-moving items, obsolescence risks, and stock optimization opportunities.

Reliability Analysis & Continuous Improvement

• Analyze maintenance data from the CMMS to identify recurring failure patterns, high-cost assets, and components with deteriorating reliability — and use these findings to optimize preventive maintenance frequencies and task content.
• Apply Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles to review and rationalize maintenance strategies for critical assets, shifting from time-based to condition-based maintenance where appropriate.
• Track key reliability indicators meant “Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) where applicable — and present trend analysis to the Maintenance Manager.
• Identify opportunities to improve planned-to-reactive maintenance ratio and propose specific initiatives to reduce unplanned downtime across the fleet and plant.

Contractor & Budget Management Support

• Prepare scopes of work, work packs, and performance requirements for planned external contractor engagements — specialist refrigeration services, electrical inspections, tyre management contracts, and vehicle body work.
• Track contractor performance against agreed schedules, quality standards, and costs — escalating variances to the Maintenance Manager for commercial management action.
• Maintain the maintenance budget tracker — recording actual spending against the approved budget on a month-by-month basis and producing variance analysis reports for the Maintenance Manager.
• Support the preparation of the annual maintenance budget — compiling asset-by-asset maintenance cost estimates based on CMMS history, service intervals, and planned major works.

Reporting & Management Information

• Prepare and submit a comprehensive monthly maintenance performance dashboard to the Maintenance Manager covering: PMS compliance, work order status, planned vs. reactive ratio, MTBF/MTTR trends, budget position, and key exception items requiring management attention.
• Produce weekly maintenance schedules and work order allocation reports for distribution to the maintenance team at the start of each week.
• Prepare shutdown completion reports, contractor performance summaries, and ad-hoc engineering management information as requested

Education:

For a Ugandan-trained professional, the following qualifications are required or preferred:

Minimum Academic Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering or Electrical Engineering, from Makerere University, Kyambogo University, or a recognized equivalent institution is required at the level.

Professional / Technical Certifications (Required or Preferred):

• Certification in Maintenance Planning & Scheduling — recognized qualifications from bodies such as the Plant Engineering & Maintenance Association (PEMAC), Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP), or equivalent international body.
• CMMS training and certification on the specific platform in use (e.g., SAP PM, IBM Maximo, Fiix, eMaint, Hippo CMMS, or equivalent).
• Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) or Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) training is a strong advantage.
• Project Management training — Prince2 Foundation, PMP, or equivalent — is an advantage for managing complex shutdown projects.
• Membership of or affiliation with the Uganda Institution of Professional Engineers (UIPE) or equivalent professional body is an advantage.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office, particularly advanced Excel (pivot tables, data modelling, dashboards) and Microsoft Project or equivalent planning tools

Skills and Experience:

Minimum Experience:

• At least 1–2 years of experience in a maintenance planning, reliability engineering, or maintenance management role within an industrial, manufacturing, agro-processing, logistics, utilities, or heavy transport environment.
• Demonstrated experience developing and managing preventive maintenance schedules across multi-asset, multi-discipline maintenance environments.
• Hands-on experience operating and administering CMMS – creating assets, work orders, PM triggers, and generating management reports.
• Experience planning and executing maintenance shutdowns or outages in a structured environment.
• Prior experience in a transport, fleet management, or cold-chain logistics environment is an advantage given the nature of this organization’s operations.

Core Technical & Professional Skills:

• Deep understanding of preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance strategies and when to apply each.
• Proficiency in CMMS administration and work order management.
• Strong data analysis skills — ability to extract, analyse, and present maintenance performance data from the CMMS and Excel.
• Knowledge of reliability engineering concepts: MTBF, MTTR, failure mode analysis, RCM, and condition-based maintenance.
• Understanding of maintenance budgeting, cost tracking, and variance analysis.
• Ability to produce professional management reports, dashboards, and presentations.
• Working knowledge of spare parts inventory management and materials planning principles.
• Familiarity with contractor management — scope of work preparation, performance monitoring, and contract administration basics

Attitude and Motivation: 

The ideal candidate must demonstrate the following personal attributes:

• Systems Thinker: Sees the maintenance operation as an interconnected system — understands how a missed PM on one asset can cascade into unplanned failures, production disruptions, and safety incidents downstream.
• Driven by Prevention: Derives professional satisfaction from preventing failures before they happen — measures success in breakdowns avoided, not breakdowns fixed.
• Data-Oriented: Trusts data over intuition; makes planning decisions based on evidence from the CMMS, reliability trends, and cost analysis rather than habit or assumption.
• Disciplined & Consistent: Brings the same rigour and attention to the maintenance plan every week — does not allow schedule adherence or CMMS data quality to deteriorate during busy periods.
• Commercially Aware: Understands that maintenance is a cost centre and takes budget stewardship seriously — always seeking the best reliability outcome for the available resource.
• Collaborative Influencer: Recognises that the maintenance plan succeeds only when engineers, mechanics, operations, and procurement all play their part — invests in relationships and communication to secure that cooperation.
• Calm Under Plan Disruption: When breakdowns and emergencies disrupt the plan — as they inevitably will — responds with composure, rapidly reprioritises, and communicates changes clearly without losing control of the broader schedule.
• Committed to Improvement: Continuously looks for ways to improve the planning system, increase PMS compliance, and shift the balance from reactive to planned maintenance.
• Honest & Transparent: Reports KPI performance accurately — including missed targets — and drives corrective action rather than finding ways to make the numbers look better than they are.
• Organised to the Core: Takes personal pride in having a clean work order queue, a current maintenance schedule, and a CMMS database that reflects reality — not aspiration

Competencies

The ideal candidate should demonstrate the following BPIL High Performance Behaviours:

• Common purpose
• Open communication
• Setting and Achieving Targets
• Sense of Urgency & Agility
• Accountability
• Collaborate Effectively
• Result-Driven Mindset
• Trust & Mutual Respect
• Customer Focused
• Innovation & Continuous Learning
• Sense of Belonging