I never used to hear about companies wanting to hire Reliability Engineers here in Ireland until two to three years ago. Now, it is becoming more prevalent and I’ve come across some widely varying definitions of what the role is about too. Donald Ray of LCE reckons that one of the most fundamental aspects of what a RE does is 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.

I’d say he’s not far off the mark there - facilitating the implementation (i.e managing CHANGE can often be the toughest part!!) . In his approach is he in danger of focussing on Acute Downtime only and perhaps not on the Chronic Downtime?

Anybody agree these are the top eight reasons why our PM programs don’t always deliver?

1)Lack of Management Support
2) Lack of Maintenance Skills
3) Wrong Equipment Selected
4) No Changing/Updating PMs
5) Poor Schedule Compliance
6) Insufficient Detail on PM Sheets
7) Data Not Being Recorded
Lack of Understanding of EPA, OSHA, ISO Regulations

Met Terry Wireman at the MEETA -Irish Maintenance Society in Dublin last year and he reckoned they were the top eight.
Could there be another one?
Lack of buy in from the people actually doing the work?