Congratulations, You're a Reliability Engineer: Now What? Part 1: The Principles of Reliability

BY JAY SHELLOGG

So you spent four or five years becoming competent in your profession (or maybe even 25 to 30 years). You saw a job opening for a reliability engineer and it looked like a good fit, so you applied, interviewed, and got it—only to find out that your company does not really define what a reliability engineer is. I mean sure, there was a list of skills required for the application, a preferred level of experience, and maybe some educational requirements, but when you actual find yourself in the position you discover that it's not well-defined. Not to mention, you may even find some folks in the organization who are openly hostile and degrading to your new position. Now what do you do? Maybe the following will help give you some guidance.

Not too many years ago, I was promoted from the position of maintenance engineer to reliability superintendent. One day I was having a conversation with the maintenance manager and he made the statement, "I guess we should rename all our maintenance engineers to reliability engineers." I asked him if we were going to have them do anything different. He said, "No, but everyone else has reliability engineers, so shouldn't we?" My reply was pretty straightforward: "No—not unless we are going to change what we expect from them." This idea of changing someone's title just because everyone else in the industry was doing it spent some time atop my list of "You're Not Going to Believe This" (though 10 years later, I admit it fell off the list a long time ago.)

The last time I searched the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES—the folks who prepare the Professional Engineering licensing tests) I did not find "Reliability Engineering" as a testable discipline. In fact, a search of the NCEES website with the word "reliability" returned no results. My point is there is no national minimally excepted standard of what a reliability engineer must know to be minimally competent. To say it another way, a reliability engineer can be anything to anybody. The fact that the term "reliability engineer" is not defined as a standard is further bolstered by the fact that, with few exceptions, there are no degree programs targeting Reliability Engineering. So where does that leave you, the new reliability engineer? It leaves you blowing in the wind, subject to the whims of past practices, tribal knowledge, and corporate folly.

This can be scary and a little depressing, but maybe I can help. I have learned some important concepts and principles over the years as I have worked in the realm of maintenance and reliability. In this article, we'll cover my 9 Principles of Reliability. In Part 2 (next week), we'll talk about my 11 Maintenance Management Concepts.

9 Principles of Reliability
If you've recently become a reliability engineer, Step 1 should be to learn these 9 principles and begin testing them to build your confidence that they are correct.
1. 80 percent (±) of all failures occur randomly with respect to age of the equipment. Only 20 percent of our equipment wears out.
2. Most equipment failures follow a degradation curve known as the P-F Interval. P is the point we can detect potential failure and F is where we have defined that the equipment has failed. The time interval between P and F is the P-F Interval. If we know how to listen, our equipment can tell us when problems are arising. We use the P-F Interval to set inspection frequencies. As a general rule, we set the inspection frequency at half of the P-F Interval.
3. The human senses are capable of detecting 80 percent (±) of failed states, and often human senses are all that are needed to detect equipment problems.
4. The people who work closest to failing equipment are the subject matter experts (SME) on that equipment.
5. Data are not required to begin reliability work—only the SME's knowledge.
6. It is vital to consider how a failure affects safety, environment, quality, and/or production, and under no circumstance should the consequence of failure or criticality be allowed to determine frequency of inspection. Consequence and/or criticality should play no role here.
7. Risk is inherent in everything we do. We must define what level of risk is tolerable, and when we find that a risk in intolerable we must know how to properly mitigate that risk.
8. Assets can only perform as well as they are designed, installed, operated, and maintained. We must understand what our equipment "can" do vs. what we "want" it to do.
9. Failure modes (root causes of failure) occur in three ways: suddenly, over a period of time, or hidden.

The above principles lay out the fundamental understanding a person needs for the correct application of any reliability initiative. The discussion above is certainly brief; entire chapters of information can and have been written about each principle. Yet I think merely a quick stating of the principle is enough for a new reliability engineer to think about and maybe investigate further.

I have one quick note about these principles. If you are in, or just coming into, an organization with a history of "reliability" activities, but the efforts are scoffed at by the rank-and-file: I guarantee that if you dig into your reliability program, you will find the understanding or application of several of these principles missing in your organization. These 9 Principles are fundamental and must be adhered to at all times, even if you don't believe them.

These ideas are at least a starting point for someone on the journey to figuring out what being a reliability engineer may mean to them. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, I will enjoy hearing from you.

Author info:
Jay Shellogg spent the last 16 years of his career working at a large pulp and paper mill as a senior environmental engineer and maintenance/reliability superintendent. During that time he encountered many challenges; in his own words, "Some I overcame, and some I didn't." Contact him at jayshellogg@strategicmaint.com.

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