Planning & Scheduling Manager

Discover Opal Maryvale Mill…

One of Australia’s leading pulp and paper manufacturing sites in regional Victoria.

Join a team focused on safety, innovation, and sustainability, where your skills contribute to essential everyday products. At Opal, you’ll find a supportive, collaborative environment with real opportunities for growth and development.

Discover the Opportunity….

Our Maryvale Paper Mill maintenance team is seeking an experienced Planning and Scheduling Manager to join us. Reporting to the Mill Maintenance Manager, this is a newly reintroduced, highly strategic leadership role.

Following a period of decentralised operations, we are re-establishing this pivotal position to drive mill-wide ownership, governance, and absolute consistency across our maintenance planning and scheduling frameworks. You will eliminate fragmented processes across different plant areas, stepping in to build a unified, predictable, and highly disciplined work-readiness culture.

You will directly lead a dedicated core team of 3 Schedulers, while holding dotted-line leadership over 20 Area Superintendents and Planners to embed site-wide standards.

The focus of this role will be to:

• Manage the end-to-end maintenance planning and scheduling across the entire mill, setting clear standards for planning horizons, work-pack quality, and schedule freeze discipline.
• Establish the frameworks for scoping, resource-levelling, and coordinating major asset shutdowns, bringing different teams together to ensure we hit our timelines without overruns.
• Partner closely with operations and execution teams so that isolation, asset access, and permit sequencing are seamlessly built into the master schedule.
• Manage the entire integrated schedule (not just the critical path) using KPIs like schedule adherence and labour utilisation to keep costs and tracking under control.
• Help move the mill from reactive tracking to proactive optimisation, running post-outage reviews to turn hands-on lessons into repeatable, step-based job plans.
• Intentionally embed Opal’s "Zero Harm" principles into every single plan, ensuring all maintenance activities meet our health, safety, and environmental standards.

What you’ll bring….

We are looking for a practical, forward-thinking planning and scheduling leader. You don't necessarily need pulp or paper experience—we are keen to talk to people from any heavy industry, manufacturing, or continuous-process environment where keeping large-scale assets running predictably is key.

We value:

• Strong experience with SAP (CMMS), along with a good working knowledge of specialised scheduling tools like Prometheus or MS Project to map out schedules and track progress.
• A proven track record of bringing order to busy environments, setting up clear team structures, and getting people to stick to planning protocols.
• The ability to coach and influence a hybrid team (both your direct reports and those on a dotted line), building high trust and accountability across different areas of the plant.
• Someone who can talk to everyone, build common ground, manage contractors, and explain the "why" behind operational changes.
• A tertiary qualification in Engineering is highly regarded, but we value equivalent hands-on, senior-level experience in heavy industrial planning just as much.

What Opal can offer you….

• The opportunity to make a real, lasting impact on a large, complex industrial site by getting a crucial department running smoothly.
• A seat on the maintenance leadership team, where your insights and data will directly help shape site-wide strategy and team culture.
• A workplace that prioritises values first, values operational excellence, and genuinely empowers you to think and act like an owner.

Discover more… by visiting our website at www.opalanz.com

Opal is an equal opportunity employer committed to a safe, inclusive, and diverse workplace. Please note all successful applicants must hold valid work rights for Australia and pass a satisfactory pre-employment medical which includes drug and alcohol checks.

Our Opal Values

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