Underappreciating and Misunderstanding the Reliability Engineer
“In our organisation, Reliability Engineers are not utilized properly. Leadership do not understand what they should be doing, and they end up doing everything across the maintenance function, except what they should be doing – thinking about reliability and preventing failure”. HEAD OF MAINTENANCE AND RELIABILITY, ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION This is an excerpt from the annual MAINSTREAM State of Asset Management Report, with detailed input from 255 participants from Australia and New Zealand representing a range of regions, industries, asset management maturity, and organisation sizes. Because the cost of failure is not great enough, business owners of most companies that participated in the survey still place greater emphasis on using systems and sweating assets rather than perfecting system reliability and eliminating asset failure at any cost. This results in a culture that has a higher risk appetite and bias to action, which is not a supportive environment for the natural reliability engineer. Strategic vs Tactical Research suggests that the predominant Myers Briggs personality for a reliability engineer is ISTJ. If you’re not familiar with Myers Briggs, this definition can be simplified as someone who is analytical, practical, reserved, direct, dutiful, insensitive, and not naturally drawn to people. Reliability engineers are more process driven than results orientated. They are required to think, design and be strategic. Their skills are not utilised effectively when they are asked to be tactical. The value we get from our reliability engineers is misunderstood. During down cycles we often move reliability engineers elsewhere in the plant to … Continue reading →