Contract Maintenance Planner Jobs in Kansas (NOW HIRING)

Position Summary

Location: Kansas City, KS
Employment Type: 12-Month+ Contract
Schedule: On-site | Primarily Monday-Friday | Day Shift
Hours: 40 hours per week, with approximately 5 hours of overtime expected weekly

Our client, a well-established global manufacturer, is seeking an experienced Maintenance and Reliability Planning Manager to lead maintenance planning, scheduling, preventive and predictive maintenance, and reliability improvement efforts at a high-volume manufacturing facility in Kansas City, KS.

This is a hands-on leadership opportunity for someone who understands what strong maintenance planning looks like in a 24/7 manufacturing environment. The Maintenance and Reliability Planning Manager will lead and develop the planning team while improving how maintenance work moves from initial notification through planning, parts readiness, scheduling, execution, feedback, and closeout.

A major focus of this role will be shifting the organization toward a more proactive, data-driven maintenance strategy. You'll work to increase planned maintenance, improve schedule compliance, strengthen preventive and predictive maintenance programs, reduce unplanned downtime, and improve equipment performance. The role also has significant ownership of SAP maintenance data, reliability analytics, spare-parts readiness, and planning processes.

This position is primarily Monday through Friday, but flexibility is important. The manager will support weekend work planning, major outages, and other plant needs as required.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, develop, and performance-manage the maintenance planning team.
• Establish clear expectations and build a culture centered on accountability, safety, continuous learning, and reliable execution.
• Develop planner capabilities through training, mentoring, skills matrices, cross-training, and stretch assignments.
• Serve as a key escalation point for maintenance planning, scheduling, and work-management decisions.
• Own and continuously improve the Work Order Management process from initial notification through planning, kitting, scheduling, execution feedback, and closeout.
• Ensure effective preparation of daily work orders, preventive maintenance activities, line-focused schedules, weekend work, and outage work.
• Develop detailed maintenance job plans and task lists that include labor estimates, parts, materials, tools, safety requirements, procedures, and sequenced work steps.
• Lead long-range scheduling and optimization of preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance activities.
• Coordinate detailed maintenance work packages for major outages and weekend work.
• Facilitate weekly planning and scheduling meetings with Operations and Maintenance leadership.
• Improve key maintenance performance indicators, including planned-work percentage, schedule compliance, backlog health, MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.
• Own the accuracy and integrity of SAP Plant Maintenance master data, including equipment BOMs, task lists, measuring points, and maintenance plans.
• Develop and continuously improve equipment-specific preventive maintenance task lists.
• Establish and manage a formal preventive maintenance audit process to evaluate work quality, accuracy, relevance, and completeness.
• Identify opportunities to transition appropriate time-based preventive maintenance activities to predictive and condition-based maintenance strategies.
• Analyze equipment performance, failure modes, downtime trends, and recurring issues using reliability data and Pareto analysis.
• Apply FMEA, root-cause analysis, and other reliability methodologies to identify equipment risks and improve maintenance strategies.
• Expand predictive maintenance capabilities using technologies such as vibration analysis, infrared thermography, oil analysis, and ultrasound.
• Develop and maintain Power BI dashboards and advanced Excel models for maintenance KPIs, equipment health, resource utilization, and reliability performance.
• Support automated production machinery, packaging equipment, process systems, and plant utilities.
• Identify critical spare parts and components while maintaining accurate equipment Bills of Material.
• Partner with Operations, Maintenance Execution, Reliability Engineering, Engineering, and Quality teams to align maintenance priorities with plant needs.
• Incorporate personnel safety and product-safety requirements into maintenance plans and schedules, including LOTO, confined-space, hot-work, and GMP requirements.
• Support corrective and preventive actions, audit readiness, maintenance documentation, and equipment-integrity requirements.
• Champion Continuous Improvement, 5S, Lean, and Reliability-Centered Maintenance principles.
• Monitor planning-related costs, spare-parts inventory health, maintenance forecasts, and cost-reduction opportunities.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in industrial maintenance, maintenance planning, or reliability within a manufacturing environment.
• 3+ years of direct leadership or supervisory experience managing maintenance planners, technicians, or comparable technical teams.
• Expert-level proficiency with SAP Plant Maintenance (SAP PM) or a comparable enterprise CMMS.
• Strong knowledge of work orders, maintenance notifications, task lists, maintenance plans, equipment BOMs, master data, and maintenance reporting.
• Demonstrated experience improving maintenance and equipment reliability performance, including MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.
• Demonstrated success increasing planned maintenance and reducing reactive or unplanned maintenance.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel capabilities, including PivotTables, Power Query, complex formulas, and data modeling.
• Strong Power BI skills with experience developing dashboards and analyzing maintenance and reliability data.
• Strong understanding of maintenance KPIs, including planned maintenance percentage, schedule compliance, backlog health, MTBF, MTTR, and OEE.

Preferences

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Reliability Engineering, or another related technical discipline; equivalent combinations of education and extensive relevant experience will also be considered.
• Experience in food, beverage, consumer products, process manufacturing, or another highly automated manufacturing environment.
• Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP) certification.
• Experience implementing, developing, or significantly expanding predictive and condition-based maintenance programs.
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt certification.
• Formal Continuous Improvement or Lean training.
• Hands-on familiarity with vibration analysis, infrared thermography, oil analysis, ultrasound, and related condition-monitoring technologies.
• Experience building reliability dashboards, maintenance analytics, and KPI reporting used to drive operational decisions.

Titles Encouraged to Apply

Candidates with experience under related titles are encouraged to apply, including:

• Maintenance Planning Manager
• Reliability Manager
• Maintenance & Reliability Manager
• Maintenance Manager
• Reliability Engineering Manager
• Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Manager
• Senior Maintenance Planner

The Opportunity

This role offers an experienced maintenance and reliability leader the opportunity to make a measurable impact on plant performance. You'll have ownership of critical planning and reliability processes while helping a technical team move toward more disciplined, proactive, and predictive maintenance practices.

If your background combines maintenance planning, SAP PM, reliability engineering, predictive maintenance, manufacturing leadership, and data-driven continuous improvement, we encourage you to apply. Our recruiting team will review qualified resumes and contact selected candidates to discuss the position and next steps.