In complex industrial plants, maintenance planners face an overwhelming puzzle every week: hundreds of work orders, crews with different skills and availabilities, and strict rules about which tasks can be done during stops or while equipment is running.

The result is long manual planning cycles, limited ability to test alternatives, and persistent backlogs. Leaders are left with tough trade-offs:

• Push crews harder to reduce backlog, at the risk of deferring scheduled maintenance.

• Increase crew size to execute more work - but at significantly higher cost.

Traditional planning methods make it hard to see these trade-offs clearly or adapt crew strategies week by week.