From Firefighting to Forecasting: How MillerCoors Rewrote the Rules of Maintenance Planning
At MillerCoors’ Golden, Colorado facility—the third-largest brewery in America—maintenance planners used to joke about “white horse wins.”
When a critical machine went down, someone would ride in with a last-minute motor, flown in first class, and save the day. Planners were even awarded trophies for the most emergency part deliveries.
But behind the scenes, it wasn’t funny. Breakdowns halted production across the 24/7 brewing operation. Maintenance teams were stuck in a cycle of heroics: fixing problems instead of preventing them, reacting to crises instead of planning with foresight.
It wasn’t for lack of tools. They had predictive technologies like vibration analysis and automated lubricators. But these tools failed to deliver their full value because there was no way to translate insights into action.
One fan failed three times in 18 months. The early warning signs were there. But nobody had the capacity or the process to prioritize and schedule the fix.
“Substantial gains are unlikely if basic planning and scheduling aren’t in place.”
—Dan Roberts, Asset CARE Director, MillerCoors
This blog explores how MillerCoors transformed its maintenance strategy by rethinking how it plans and schedules resources—and what that journey can teach other manufacturers.
Because in modern maintenance, success isn’t about responding faster. It’s about not needing to respond at all.
Why Resource Planning Fails
For many manufacturers, maintenance still runs on instinct and improvisation. Tasks are scheduled reactively. Work orders pile up. Technicians get double-booked. And when something breaks, everything else gets dropped.
That was the reality at MillerCoors not long ago. Planners printed work orders and handed them off to supervisors. There was no real capacity planning. No prioritization. No joint review with operations. Everyone was too busy reacting to yesterday’s issues to prevent tomorrow’s.
“Two people can’t plan for 4,000 pieces of equipment,” said one planner. “All they’ll have time for is ordering parts.”
Worse still, essential signals—like early vibration anomalies—were lost in the noise. The insights were there, but no system connected the dots between detection, prioritization, and scheduling. Even predictive tools became performative, rather than preventative.
This scenario isn’t unique to MillerCoors. According to Shankar et al. (2021), many organizations struggle to manage maintenance resources due to siloed tools and processes.
Technicians, spare parts, schedules, and production priorities all live in separate systems. There’s no shared view of capacity. No dynamic scheduling. And no feedback loop to improve planning over time.
The results?
- Overtime spikes
- Audits fail
- Technicians burn out
- Breakdowns recur
And the CMMS, if present, ends up recording problems instead of preventing them.
This is the cost of disjointed resource planning. And it’s why even the best predictive tech can’t deliver without the operational backbone to support it.
The Real Cost of Poor Planning
When resource planning breaks down, the consequences ripple far beyond the maintenance team. MillerCoors learned this the hard way.
In one case, vibration analysis flagged abnormalities in a fan weeks before failure. But the insight went nowhere—no follow-up, no prioritization, no scheduled intervention. The fan failed for a third time in 18 months.
It wasn’t a tech failure. It was a planning failure.
“We had the data,” said Asset CARE Director Dan Roberts. “What we didn’t have was a system to act on it.”
Poor planning leads to stranded labor, wasted windows, and ballooning costs. Maintenance crews stand idle because parts aren’t ready. Or worse, production lines sit silent because a scheduled job wasn’t completed in time. And when work gets done, the lessons often get lost in incomplete work orders and untraceable fixes.
Beneath the surface, this kind of firefighting culture burns through time, money, and morale. And it’s not just anecdotal. One major study found that poor planning and resource management have a measurable impact:
- Productivity drops by as much as 60%
- Maintenance costs spike by 50% or more
- And organizational performance takes a significant hit, with coordination and outcomes often declining by half
Even when companies invest in predictive tools or preventive programs, without smart scheduling and planning, the gains are short-lived. Information gets stuck. Work gets rushed. Failures repeat.
It’s like diagnosing a patient, but never scheduling the surgery.
What Smart Planning Looks Like
The turning point at MillerCoors came when leadership stopped romanticizing firefighting and started investing in foresight. They didn’t just add more technology—they restructured how planning happened.
First, they gave planners dedicated roles and manageable scopes. Instead of two people juggling 4,000 assets, each planner was responsible for a defined area—based on geography, equipment complexity, or crew size. The ideal ratio? One planner for every 15–18 technicians.
Then they established weekly planning meetings across departments—reviewing upcoming work, prioritizing tasks, and aligning on resource needs. Maintenance windows were negotiated in advance, with clear scope and timelines.
They even mapped a 12-month downtime plan for their can manufacturing line—1,655 hours of scheduled maintenance, engineered to eliminate surprises.
And most importantly, they used the data in their CMMS to make it happen:
- Who’s available on a given shift?
- What parts or permits are needed?
- What jobs can we group during the same downtime?
“We had to prove that if you give us the time, we will get the planned, proactive work done.”
—Tim Davison, Asset CARE Planner
This level of coordination is exactly what XMaintain enables, without spreadsheets or siloed systems. With XMaintain’s drag-and-drop scheduling, planners can:
- See resource availability in real time
- Balance workloads by shift, skill, or asset priority
- Automatically attach the required tools and documents to each job
- Adjust schedules dynamically when production changes
It’s planning, not guesswork. Visibility, not chaos.
Smart resource planning isn’t just about avoiding breakdowns. It’s about using people’s time well, aligning with production, and building trust between departments. Because when the plan works, everyone wins.
The Payoff: Measurable Results
At MillerCoors, the shift from reactive chaos to structured planning wasn’t just a cultural win—it delivered hard numbers.
Planned and scheduled work went from less than 30% to over 60% across many departments. In the forklift area alone, preventive maintenance completion jumped from 31% to 82% in under 18 months. Equipment availability soared. Productivity followed. And maintenance costs finally came down.
“We always had great people with a desire to do the right things,” said engineer Mike Fognani. “Planning and scheduling let us combine those great people with the tools, materials, and time required to be successful.”
This wasn’t a lucky break—it was the result of deliberate, structured, data-driven planning.
The patterns match what industry research has shown time and again: when companies invest in resource and asset planning, they see transformative gains. According to Shankar et al. (2021), smart RAM practices are directly linked to:
- Up to 60% greater productivity
- 50% lower maintenance costs
- Stronger team performance and audit outcomes
And because the system now tracks the correct data—from labor hours to cause codes—MillerCoors uses that feedback to continuously fine-tune PM intervals, prioritize recurring failure points, and improve how work is planned for the next shutdown.
This is the virtuous cycle that smart planning enables:
Visibility → Planning → Execution → Feedback → Optimization.
And it’s exactly the cycle that platforms like XMaintain support, straight out of the box.
Because when the planning gets smarter, everything else does too.
Is Your CMMS Holding You Back?
Not every maintenance team brews 217 million ounces of beer a day. But the underlying challenge is the same: if your planning process isn’t integrated, your performance will stay reactive—no matter how many sensors or spreadsheets you have.
The question is: Can your current system keep up with the way your team needs to work?
Ask yourself:
- Do planners have real-time visibility into technician capacity and shift availability?
- Can you adjust schedules dynamically when production priorities change?
- Are downtime windows fully used, or wasted due to missing parts or prep?
- Can you track planned vs. unplanned work across teams and timeframes?
- Are work orders tied to actual root causes, asset histories, and labor hours?
If you answered “no” to more than one of these, your CMMS might be more of a filing cabinet than a planning engine.
At MillerCoors, it wasn’t enough to have data—they needed a way to turn that data into action. That shift—from disconnected tasks to coordinated strategy—is what made the difference.
And it’s the shift that XMaintain is built for.
See What Smart Scheduling Looks Like
MillerCoors didn’t transform its maintenance performance with more effort. It achieved this with smarter planning, better visibility, and the right systems to support both.
If your team is still chasing parts, fighting fires, or wasting valuable maintenance windows, it’s time to ask:
Is your CMMS helping you plan, or just helping you document what went wrong?
XMaintain’s scheduling and resource planning tools are designed to make strategic maintenance the default, not the exception.
With real-time capacity views, drag-and-drop calendars, integrated asset data, and automated work order logic, it’s everything you need to run a more proactive, performance-driven maintenance operation.
Want to see what smarter planning could look like for your team?
Book a demo—or explore how XMaintain helps you align the right people, tools, and time for every job.
Because in modern maintenance, the best “white horse rescue” is the one you never need to make.
