Maintenance Planning Control Architecture Director — Copper Mining

The mandate

Weekly schedules achieve nominal compliance because cancelled tasks, cannibalised parts and emergency work are reclassified after the fact. Planners inherit incomplete job plans, supervisors hold local backlogs, and shutdown scopes enter freeze without access, isolation or contractor readiness. Each mine measures different planning horizons, making labour efficiency appear comparable while hidden unready work drives equipment loss and expensive schedule breakage.

The commissioned artefact is a Maintenance Planning Control Architecture covering work identification, defect priority, job-plan quality, materials confirmation, permits, isolation, skills, contractor mobilisation, freeze rules, schedule loading, break-in work, deferral, closeout and feedback. It must distinguish legitimate operating response from avoidable planning failure and connect fixed-plant, mobile-fleet and shutdown controls without imposing one artificial cadence.

By week four, milestone one accepts work-flow and evidence baselines; week nine approves job-readiness and backlog definitions. Site control designs close at week fourteen, eight residencies conclude by week nineteen and four schedule rehearsals finish by week twenty-three. At week twenty-six, the sixth milestone delivers accepted controls, role guides, measures, exception taxonomy and sequenced implementation backlog.

Acceptance requires client planners to build two unfamiliar weekly schedules from raw defects, warehouses to verify material confidence, and supervisors to process break-in work without retrospective recoding. The Group Operations Executive signs when each mine re-performs the controls during a simulated crusher constraint and contractor shortfall, preserves safety prerequisites and explains every deferred high-consequence job without consultant intervention.

The client will provide defect registers, maintenance plans, schedules, work orders, materials data, contractor rosters, permit and isolation rules, outage history, cost records, system access and named site owners. Outside the scope are production scheduling, equipment strategy, CMMS replacement, vendor selection, safety-case approval, contract negotiation, live shutdown command and certification of maintenance effectiveness.

Why this is external work

Site teams are consumed by current schedule recovery, and the central function owns measures that have normalised retrospective compliance. Independent design capacity can follow evidence from defect to closeout, reconcile three operating realities and set acceptance tests without taking the mines’ maintenance or safety authority.

What you will own

• Map defect, work request, planning, material, isolation, scheduling, execution, closeout and feedback evidence across sites.
• Define job readiness through scope, method, parts, access, skills, risk controls, duration and accountable sign-off.
• Separate break-in work, approved deferral, cancellation, scope growth and planning failure through auditable event codes.
• Set backlog health measures by consequence, age, readiness, system, asset state and executable planning horizon.
• Design weekly and shutdown freeze controls with explicit override, escalation, expiry and post-event review requirements.
• Rehearse crusher constraint, material substitution, contractor shortfall, emergency entry and incomplete-closeout scenarios.
• Deliver process architecture, control catalogue, role decisions, metric dictionary, test evidence and rollout sequence.

Candidate qualifications

• Designed maintenance-planning controls across large mining, mineral processing or similarly remote asset-intensive operations.
• Improved job readiness and schedule stability without gaming compliance through cancellation or retrospective recoding.
• Integrated parts, permits, isolation, workforce and contractor evidence into executable weekly and shutdown plans.
• Distinguished maintenance planning defects from reliability strategy, operating interruption and legitimate emergency response.
• Worked fluently with planners, supervisors, warehouses, contractors, safety teams and enterprise asset systems.
• Transferred sustainable control ownership through client-built schedules and adverse scenarios using unfiltered raw operational evidence.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete eight remote-site residencies and four schedule-quality rehearsals inside the six-month engagement.
• Direct mine-maintenance planning architecture is required; generic lean or CMMS implementation alone is insufficient.
• Will disclose mining operators, maintenance contractors, equipment suppliers, EAM vendors and planning-software interests.
• Will not direct live maintenance, approve isolations, select vendors, negotiate contracts or certify asset reliability.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a maintenance schedule whose reported compliance concealed unready or reclassified work.
2. 49 words maximum. How did you define executable backlog across materially different mine sites?
3. 49 words maximum. Which raw-evidence scheduling exercise would you use for final client acceptance?