What is a reliability engineer?
After I decided to participate in writing a blog for Reliable Plant, I had to decide where to start. The decision was a tough one because of the varying levels of experience the readers possess. I thought that the beginning would be the best place to start and encourage participation. Defining what a reliability engineer is can allow us to see various levels of expectations for the job.
I have put together a small list of duties that many reliability engineers are expected to perform. The list is in no way complete, and this is where I ask for your participation. What are some of the things you can add to this list? I think the real benefit from the overall participation with this will be the comprehensive experience of expectations in regards to the duties of a reliability engineer. This may even help some employers who are looking at creating the position gain some valuable insight to develop the job description.
A reliability engineer …
- Conducts failure analyses
- Adjusts maintenance tasks and scheduling
- Determines the use of predictive maintenance technologies
- Assists in setting required training and standards
- Reviews maintenance and installation plans for new equipment
- Monitors equipment trends
- Conducts root cause failure analysis (RCFA)
As I said, this is a small list, and I would like some participation. Do not worry about semantics and just throw the comments out there. Several of these areas could be expanded with more specific items like Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), fault tree analysis (FTA), and reliability block diagrams (RBD).
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Filed Under: Featured, Reliability Engineering | Tags: predictive maintenance
Comments
By Gregory Cox on December 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Robert,
Thanks for your comments concerning Reliability Engineering.
I’d like to add to your comments.
Reliability Engineering
- Apply their knowledge in methods and processes to prevent, or reduce, the likelihood or frequency of failures in a system.
- Use their knowledge gained from Failure Analysis to determine core failure mechanisms and their intrinsic activation energy, useful for predictive modeling.
- Apply the techniques not only of FTA, but Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) and their variants.
- Determine the reliability characteristic of new systems (easier said than done).
- Use statistics and probability to determine the reliability characteristics of your system (or part, etc.).
Note; The American Society of Quality (ASQ) publishes quite a bit of information on Reliability including their Body of Knowledge (BOK) for the Certified Reliability Engineer Exam. See http://www.asq.org for more information. Or send any blogs my way as well.
Regards,
Gregory Cox
Pr. Quality Assurance Engineer
Aeroflex Microelectronic Solutions
ASQ CRE, CQE
By Rob Apelgren on December 23rd, 2008 at 6:24 am
Gregory:
Thank you for the input and attaching the link to ASQ. Great points!
By Rex Gallaher on January 7th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I look forward to learning of success stories.
Coming from the organizational development side of the picture, I would hope that the reliability engineer champions continuous improvement, fosters relationships between the plant functions to focus on total quality, trains employees on reliability processes, trains supervision on the impact that the operators and technicians have on reliability, provides reliability and maintainability specifications for new procurements, is involved in developing support plans for new equipment, reviews completed work orders, assists planners with reliability concerns, promotes preventive maintenance as ongoing experiments and champions the technicans through continuous education.
I probably stepped on your future blogs. I look forward to following your articles and would appreciate your comments on my blog. Especially success and failure stories.
Rex Gallaher
People Management Blogger
By Robert Hansen on January 8th, 2009 at 8:28 am
I recommend that a reliability engineer attain CMRP certification to confirm practical knowledge of the five key dimensions developed by SMRP.
I would also add that they become champions of Presreving Failure Data in their organization (Scott Broussard’s 1994 article in Reliability magazine).
They should also be skilled at data analysis (combining multiple database information), charting, trending, statistics, and doing Designed Experiments.
By Tom Whittemore on January 8th, 2009 at 8:52 am
A reiliability engineer may also:
- Establish reliability requirements/objectives of a process, system, or machine train.
- Estimate process and/or equipment reliability using data/experiments and statistics.
- Identifies opportunities for making reliability improvements.
- Identifies critical equipment and develops reliability strategies for this equipment based on FMEA.
- Reviews equipment specs/designs to ensure equipment can meet reliability objectives.
- Carries out life cycle cost analyses to determine most cost effective strategy/option.
By Mark Drejza on January 8th, 2009 at 11:34 am
All great comments. To build on all that, I think Reliability Engineers use the reliability data and analysis tools to help with prioritization of equipment issues, be it a Top Ten list of most impactful equipment or an analysis of which/when equipment will fail when thinking about where to spend maintenance or capital dollars. Also, I think it is important to say what they don’t do. For example, Reliability Engineers, with a strategic focus, determine the need and scope of Predictive Maintenance, but they don’t necessarily manage those programs tactically. They set them up and then reap the benefits of the data they collect as it all feeds into those aforementioned analyses.
By Stan Stephenson on January 8th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
As reliability engineers we often over-look a fundamental function of our jobs - marketeers of the value of our reliability efforts. For most of us, the technical side is the fun part and we have a tendency to put other activities off. However, we have to remember that regardless of how successful a reliability program is technically, it will be viewed as just another cost or time adder to a project unless your management and design engineering staff are educated to the value brought by the reliability program. When we do highlight values, then we have a tendency to focus only on value brought through reliability improvement. Once you start looking for value, you find that there is often much more value that can be highlighted from cost avoidance. For example, anytime you do a FMEA and identify a failure mode that is corrected, identify the cost to the company if that failure mode had slipped through. If you do a DOE, how much cost did you avoid from not having to do as many tests? The value coming from reliability activities are all around us. The trick is to start recognizing and demonstrating them. Once you learn where and how to look for value, you will start operating from the principle “If it doesn’t bring value, don’t do it.” At that point, you are looked on as a “value add”.
By Rob Apelgren on January 9th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Wow! Excellent points indeed. I appreciate all of the comments and invite others to jump on in. As we can see there is a lot to Reliability Engineering and I think in the future this field will be a major cornerstone in most companies. What good is it to have assets if you cannot maintain them?
By Gregg A. Pacelli on January 9th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Great input from all parties, The list is simple, covering the basic fundamentals. From the input it is clear to see that a Reliability Engineer can/must be a very broad based individual with many talents.
Because the nature of what we do often does not often have immediate results , I would like to reinforce the fact that we need to be able to emphasis the business side ($$ savings) to our upper management.
By John Crocker on January 12th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I would like to suggest that that a Reliability Engineer should be a member of Design Team responsible for ensuring the product is as reliable as is practical within the constraints of safety and cost.
By Ian Knight on January 12th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Very interestering comments from all. The question I would like to submit for some commentry is - Is the appointment of a Reliability Engineer going to really change the way we conduct our maintenance?
I am assuming that companies who want to appoint a Reliability Engineer already have reliability or predictive maintenance processes, like condition monitoring, oil analysis and filtering etc in place and the Reliability Engineer is going to pull it all together and ensure the delivery of the financial returns these technologies will bring.
However, from my recent 12 months experiences working in a cardborad corrugator plant trying to implement or move the plants maintenance strategies to that of Proactive Maintenance process, I have seen the need to focus our initial reliability work much differently than I first believed. This focus I now believe to be is a 12 months reliability awareness activity, with maintenance folks on the shop floor and production staff.
I have proven two basic fundementals, improvements in equipment reliability can be measured in, 1, annual bearing consumption and 2, the amount of lubricants a plant consumes. And a consideration point is that the maintenance staff play a very big part in acheiving these goals,
In the last 12 months I have conducted RCFA on over 40 replaced or failed bearings and my conclusions are:
Over 65% of the failures were related to lubrication failures. Mixed or wrong lubes, too much or too less lube and oil contamination.
Aproximately 15% were from poor maintenance practices. Over and under adjustment, surface damage and incorrect setups.
A number (approximately 5%) are from ignorance. Wrong clearances, wrong suffixs and simply the wrong type fitted.
To address the way to eliminate these failures requires a basic initial activity, for example:
Training maintenance staff on basic bearing handling.
Training maintenance staff on what is effective equiment lubrication.
Conduction RCFA on all failed bearings and SHARING the findings with maintenance and key production staff.
And perhaps the most important, to focus on a having in place a reliability based lubrication strategy.
The bottom line I am trying to say is, if you really want reliability practices in place (quickly and sustainably) the Reliability Engineer should focus on getting the fundemental maintenance culture on the shop floor correct first. This I believe will take 12 months.
Additionally, don’t get me wrong I am not saying we don’t need condition monitoring or other reliability techniques, we do, they are our failure detectors, but they don’t entirely make machine parts last longer.
Ian Knight
Enluse BV
By Mark Jupe on January 15th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
a “Reliability Engineer ” should have key objectives and a set of KPI’s that his/her performance can be measured against. If the Planning department is responsible to execute the plan and 99.9% of its KPI’s are based on Execution , then whom infact is responsible for the EFFECTIVENESS of the Plan ? You all spend millions on a maintenance budget , both operational and capital , who measures whether it actually had any effect , yes thats reliability !!! Therefore should not the reliability engineer be totally responsible for the effectiveness of the Site wide PM Plan ? Whats the difference between a Good well targetted plan thats badly executed , and a Bad plan thats well executed ? . All the statistical tools , RCM,RCA.FMEA,Wiebull,Montecarlo ,Defect elimination , should all be aimed at continuously improving the “PLAN”
By Rob Teijgeman on January 19th, 2009 at 3:24 am
As a former maintenance manager of a corrugating plant, the one which Ian Knight before wrote in his comment, I can tell you that the benefits of having a good maintenance strategy included a Reliability Engineer are substantial. The main task of the engineer will be facilitating the culture change within a company.
We can mention all kinds of concepts, but when you don’t have a driven and well educated RI, you will not succeed. Enluse BV was the company who did implement the PME strategy for the corrugating and converting plant. PME stands for Pro-Active Maintenance Evolution. It is related to RCM2 and it already saved a lot of money, just by using a pro-active attitude. Which means e.g. online and offline condition monitoring, a proper lubrication schedule with oil analysis and training of the staff. The results were amazing. Up-time of the corrugating line was increased with 3% the first year. The maintenance costs went down with over 10%. Not to be mentioned the savings in energy and higher quantity and quality of products!
It is very hard to compete and survive in the corrugating industry those days. To lower the production costs (by looking after the KPI’s) will payback the costs of a Reliability Engineer more then ever.
Regards,
Rob Teijgeman
Consultant
ENCORRS BV
http://www.encorrs.com
By Sebastien Cournoyer on February 7th, 2009 at 9:46 am
This is a great subject…
I will like to add a twist to it from a Lean perspective. First, to clarify what lean is all about… lean does not mean cutting heads or getting rid of people, lean by definition is an Operation Management / Production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination…
So understanding this principle, should we also look at the Reliability Engineering toolbox as a bunch of tool to be use within an organization/team rather than a pre-defined position? If there is a true proactive environment in a facility, every positions, every roles from the operation to the upper management should add value to the customer… Eliminating failures and managing PM can also be done by a team of expert in tune with the facility operations/maintenance. It does not necessarily mean that you must have a position for these specific tasks… You may have a subject matter expert on RCM, an other one on RCFA… The bottom line is that the team should use these resources as needed and learn from them so they can become independent.
In a true lean environment hands off are eliminating and waste reduction is done by the expert at the point of activities.
By Stan Stephenson on February 8th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Good point Sebastien. To put it more succintly, Reliability comes from everyone who touches a product or process whether inside or outside a firm. the Reliability Engineer’s primary function is as a “facilitator” to make sure that everyone who touches the product or process is engaged and using the correct tools. There are two routes you can take to reliability. Either a large reliability staff that is not cost effective or a small staff that teaches everyone else to fish. The second provides a value-add to everyone.
By Muhammad on March 28th, 2009 at 1:02 am
Good inputs from all participants.
I think the role of Reliability Engineer is like a CONSENSUS for all the other sections within the organisation. RE’s role should be more Strategic rather than tactical.
Some add ups from myside:
RE should improve the visibility and awareness of reliability data within the organisation, since problems those become visible get addressed. Visibility improvement is part of reliability improvement. RE sould also identify and address basic underlaying conditions for failure avoidence, since a lot of root causes of failures lie in the category of BASICS improvement. e.g. lubrication, bolt tightness, cleanliness, best practices etc. Should also address the Operational reliability improvement tasks, since operation of assets play a key role in achieving the intrinsic reliability ( i.e designed or built-in reliability). Reliability improvement is not just Maintenance business.
By Dibyendu Mukherjee on June 3rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
Relibility Engineer should focus more on condition based maitenance rather than using time based maitenance theory. As is rightly said that his/her role is more strategic, one should concentrate on relibility centered business development programs. Innovative ideas should be shared particularly in CBM field. One Reliability engineer should try to compile his whole plant in a single page format. One reliability index for the plant can be created, which will give him an idea about the total plant condition. The same table may give us root cause for low reliability and accordingly we can attack that area to improve reliablity. In my plant I am using such a calculator.
By Adrian Pienaar on August 11th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Hi,
Do you have the roles and responsibilities of Reliability Engineers in the FMCG Manufacturing Environment. I would be interested in this. Thanks,
Adrian
By Peter Bouzek on September 12th, 2009 at 11:15 am
If you are interested in determining the root cause of defects, please visit my website http://www.MachineMonitors.com. I have related blogs and offer video surveillance for production lines.
By Adrian Pienaar on October 22nd, 2009 at 6:04 am
If you are about to enbark on introducing Reliability Engineers into your business, what must you be aware of?
By KRISHNA NANGARE on December 24th, 2009 at 3:44 am
Reliability engineer who’s is the key person to have various companion in the plant where some of the observations of rotating equipments are noted and proactive actions are initiated.
Reliability engineer who create visual surveillance checklist to be carried out on equipments where major and minor observations are noted to decide the line of actions and its effect on equipments functionally in immediate and long term period.
By DC Motors Rewinding on October 8th, 2010 at 3:19 am
Hi,
Nice article. In my opinion reliability engineer is can allow us to see various levels of expectations for the service or job.Thanks for explaining definition of reliability engineer. Keep it up.
By Selva on November 15th, 2010 at 1:33 am
A reliability engineers main focus should be to set a model by collecting data and predicting failure pattern and subsequently establish KPI’s and KRA’s and monitor the model that has been set and identify and correct the gap that is present between the model and the actual condition of the plant or equipment and continously improve to meet the objective.
Not to forget the correlation between individual components and the system ie plant reliability.
Selva