When do I need to hire a reliability engineer? How does reliability affect safety?
Hiring a reliability engineer is important when your organization wants to optimize how equipment runs for its intended use and for effective cost.
What is the role of a reliability engineer?
The role of a reliability engineer is to ensure that the plant is running effectively and efficiently – this is done by performing strategic tasks that reduce losses and increase the total uptime of a plant. If you want to take proactive steps to purposefully get more out of your plant, and you have enough data to analyze and get insights out of, then yes, you could benefit from hiring a reliability engineer.
How does a reliability engineer fit in with the overall organizational structure?
From looking at the high-level tasks of a reliability engineer, one might think that someone within the plant is already performing this role. Maybe even the whole team is already consciously trying to improve the production performance of the plant. This is a good sign! A dedicated workforce would show the initiative to take steps in improving the plant’s effectiveness.
However, you can imagine that having a dedicated resource to do a particular job would have its benefits. The main thing that sets reliability engineers apart from the rest of the maintenance team, is that they are expected to resolve problems in a less reactive way – their solution to a problem usually requires a long-term approach. This difference in approaching a problem shows why reliability engineering tasks might hold back the usual pace of maintenance teams to perform urgent and immediate resolution. Allowing your maintenance team to execute their operational tasks, then having a dedicated resource such as a reliability engineer to develop the strategies, gives you mastery in both the maintenance and reliability aspects of running the plant.
How does a reliability engineer affect organizational processes?
When hiring a reliability engineer, it is important to clearly define their objectives and clearly set them apart from already existing roles within the team. The basic roles of a reliability engineer can be summarized as loss elimination, risk management, and optimization of the life cycle of assets – all of which require extensive data analysis and data collection if the information is not available already.
A reliability engineer promotes the culture of reliability by involving the team in taking strategic steps to improve processes. With the right tools and data to work with, the reliability engineer working with the maintenance team can provide concrete plans to improve your performance.
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How does reliability affect safety?
Reliability affects safety by making hazardous equipment failures less likely to occur. That said, it’s only one part of a greater whole when it comes to creating a safe work environment.
The relationship between reliability and safety
When production systems are running reliably, there are fewer unexpected stops, less need for reactive maintenance, and therefore less risk of the injuries it may cause. Current data seems to support that concept.
Injuries during reactive maintenance
For example, one study showed that those most prone to injury on the job are inexperienced maintenance technicians doing reactive work. In addition, at Exxon-Mobil, accidents were found to be five times more likely during breakdown maintenance than scheduled work.
OEE and accidents
OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) is often used to gauge reliability. When comparing OEE to the incidence of accidents in a facility, one study found that higher OEE was correlated with fewer workplace injuries.
Schedule compliance
Schedule compliance is another metric used to measure reliability because the more on top of PMs you are, the less likely equipment is to fail. When comparing this metric to injury rates, 90% schedule compliance is associated with the lowest rates of injuries.
Reliability as a part of a whole
That said, reliability isn’t the only factor that affects safety. Many industrial accidents occur at facilities with high levels of reliability, while other facilities with low reliability may see accidents completely unrelated to equipment faults.
There are many components of workplace safety. For instance, OSHA mentions the following as major elements of an effective safety program:
Providing protective equipment, developing standardized safety procedures, and increasing accountability naturally branch out from these components, and all factor into reducing workplace injuries.
The main takeaway
Reliability plays a vital role in improving workplace safety, but it needs to be coupled with other procedures and processes as well. Training employees and supervisors, providing adequate safety equipment, and reducing hazards on the work floor can help cover safety risks that reliability alone cannot.
Ultimately, focusing on reliability alone will not eliminate workplace accidents entirely, but it can go a long way toward reducing hazards. Hiring a reliability engineer could have huge benefits for your organization's overall safety, as well as improve OEE in your business.