Reliability Manager (Utilities)

One of the fundamental roles of the Reliability Engineer is to track the production losses and abnormally high maintenance cost assets, then find ways to reduce those losses or high costs. These losses are prioritized to focus efforts on the largest/most critical opportunities. The Reliability Engineer (in full partnership with the operations team) develops a plan to eliminate or reduce the losses through root cause analysis, obtains approval of the plan and facilitates the implementation.

Another role of the Reliability Engineer is to manage risk to the achievement of an organization’s objectives in the areas of asset capability, quality, and production.

Life Cycle Asset Management:

The Reliability Engineer needs to be involved in the design and installation stages of projects for new assets and modification of existing assets.

Reliability Engineer Responsibilities and Duties:

1. Works with Project Engineering to ensure the reliability and maintainability of new and modified installations. The Reliability Engineer is responsible for adhering to the Life Cycle Asset Management (LCAM) process throughout the entire life cycle of new assets.
2. Participates in the development of design and installation specifications along with commissioning plans. Participates in the development of criteria for and evaluation of equipment and technical MRO suppliers and technical maintenance service providers. Develops acceptance tests and inspection criteria.
3. Participates in the final check out of new installations. This includes factory and site acceptance testing that will assure adherence to functional specifications.
4. Guides efforts to ensure reliability and maintainability of equipment, processes, utilities, facilities, controls, and safety/security systems.
5. Professionally and systematically defines, designs, develops, monitors and refines an Asset Maintenance Plan that includes:
1. Value-added preventive maintenance tasks
2. Effective utilization of predictive and other non-destructive testing methodologies designed to identify and isolate inherent reliability problems
6. Provides input to a Risk Management Plan that will anticipate reliability-related, and non-reliability-related risks that could adversely impact plant operation.
7. Develops engineering solutions to repetitive failures and all other problems that adversely affect plant operations. These problems include capacity, quality, cost or regulatory compliance issues. To fulfill this responsibility the Reliability Engineer applies:
1. Data analysis techniques that can include:
1. Reliability modeling and prediction
2. Root-cause and Root-Cause Failure Analysis (RCA, RCFA)
3. Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System (FRACAS)
8. Works with Production to perform analyses of assets including:
1. Overall Equipment Effectiveness
2. Remaining useful life
3. Other parameters that define operating condition, reliability, and costs of assets
9. Provides technical support to production, maintenance management and technical personnel.
10. Applies value analysis to repair/replace, repair/redesign, and make/buy decisions.