Planning & scheduling
PM programs built from the ground up, job plans and SOPs crews can follow, a backlog prioritized by criticality, and a weekly schedule production can count on.
Chad ZahnerMaintenance Planner & Scheduler
I keep plants running.
I'm a maintenance planner, Navy veteran, and builder of practical tools. I turn reactive maintenance into planned work, and I build the systems that make it stick.
RMIC · University of TennesseeU.S. Navy · USS Mahan
Results at a glance● Plant floor
53%
Less downtime on the top 5 breakdown assets
80%
Weekly schedule compliance
182
PMs in a library built from scratch
85%
PM compliance across four crews
What I doPlanning, reliability,
Planning, reliability,
and better tools.
From a destroyer's engine room to the plant floor — now on the planning side that keeps it all running.
Reliability & root cause
Chasing chronic bad actors with A3, 5-Why, FMEA, and Pareto. Tracking the KPIs that matter and turning emergency work into planned work.
Tools that help
Dashboards, planner toolkits, study apps, and AI prototypes — built to save planners and technicians real time on the floor.
Featured project · RMIC A3 capstone
Cutting downtime on the five worst breakdown assets in half.
A structured A3 project for my RMIC certification, aimed at the plant's top five breakdown assets — the machines driving the most unplanned downtime.
- Targeted the worst offenders with Pareto analysis
- Dug into root causes of the chronic failures
- Shifted the work from emergency to planned
- Tracked the results week over week
−53%downtime on the
top 5 breakdown assets
top 5 breakdown assets
Background
How I got here.
2024 — Now
Maintenance Planner & Scheduler
Cardinal IG · Roanoke, VA
2021 — 2024
Maintenance Technician Lead
Cardinal Glass
2017 — 2020
Customer Service Representative
Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield · Federal Employee Program
2011 — 2017
Production Assembler · Quality Auditor
Altec
2003 — 2011
Gas Turbine Systems Technician · Lead Oil King
U.S. Navy · USS Mahan (DDG-72)
From the lab
All projects →Things I'm building.
Live
CMRPstudy
Free CMRP exam prep — flashcards, a practice exam, and a Ramsey Multicraft prep app.
cmrpstudy.com →Live demo
Job Plan Builder
Describe the job, add drawings, and export a step-by-step job plan to Word.
Try it →Live demo
Maintenance KPI Dashboard
Planned work, PM compliance, MTBF/MTTR and bad actors — computed from work-order data.
Try it →