reliability and maintenance 3

[oscyes]

hello every body,

I am a recent gradueted mechanical engineer and I would like to get some advice about reliability and maintenance branch.

is it a well appreciated branch?
which certifications should I get?
do you recommend any literature for studying this area?

thanks a lot for any advice you could give to me

I apologise for my english, hope you can understand me.

 

[geesamand]

I am not a Reliability and Maintenance Engineer, but my company sells products that R&M Engineers usually value.

Fundamentally, R&M are not "adders" to the company's bottom line like project engineers or corporate engineering. They are "subtractors" from the cost side of the balance sheet because well-maintained and reliable processes and equipment are assumed by accounting and management, and maintenance and breakdown costs are unfortunate events to them. (They never took Thermo to learn about Entropy, which plainly states why maintenance is unavoidable). The company has to spend money on these roles and fund their projects to save even more money elsewhere. It's a job based on reality, not based on being a contributor to the basic business process and value stream. It's one of the first places that companies look when they want instant cost-cutting. It's caused by the reality that the company naturally gravitates toward the easiest/cheapest solutions, and there is always a point where too cheap and easy costs more in maintenance and reliability than it saves at the purchase.

The engineers who succeed in this role are able to convince the company to look at total value, and keep track of the numbers. They use root cause failure analysis to fix persistent problems permanently. They prove how proposals will save money, and include estimates of how long the payoff will be. Then they continually work on new improvements and monitor the existing ones. This way management gets a constant reminder of what this role costs and how much money it saves the company, and are not taken for granted. The good ones are constantly selling themselves to the company, because being let go and letting the company learn the hard way is rarely a useful lesson.

Unsuccessful R&M engineers don't justify with dollars, don't remind management of how past successes are still paying off, and don't have to resist the natural tendency toward buying the cheapest possible thing. They treat it like other engineering roles and just assume that the company will make the changes and appreciate it.

Some companies have a culture that refuses to value intelligent investment and continuous improvement. They just react to things that break, when the break, and rely on hysteria to get back on-line. Don't enter a company like this unless you have commitment from the very top (fully responsible for profit/loss) that this culture must change and will change. Another company to avoid is one overly driven by quarterly reportings - the payback periods can be unreasonably short. Private companies with a longer-term view on growth tend to support the total cost worldview better.

David

 

[JJPellin]

I have worked the vast majority of my (25+ year) career in maintenance and reliability roles. I find reliability to be the most fascinating, interesting, diverse and fulfilling work. I am specifically specialized in rotating machinery. I regularly work with mechanical engineering students (as summer interns) and new ME graduates. I am constantly amazed by how little our US colleges and universities teach ME students about the basic subjects of rotating machinery. You can graduate with a BSME in the US and know almost nothing about bearings, lubrication, couplings or mechanical seals. These students often know very little about precision measurements or the instruments used to take these measurements.

I respectfully disagree with geesamand on a few points. The types of companies that jump to maintenance and reliability for easy cost cutting are not the sorts of companies you want to work for (in any position). The companies that are on the leading edge of safety and profitability recognize that excellent reliability pays off in so many ways. I have never feared for my job in reliability even in the darkest days of cost cutting and tight budgets.

In my industry (oil refining) reliability engineers are in short supply and are well paid as a result. Reliability engineers with specific areas of expertise (rotating machinery, corrosion and metallurgy, instrumentation and controls) are very much appreciated and sought after.

My fondness for reliability is tied to the diversity of the work. We work to understand past failures and prevent them from occurring again (RCFA, FMEA/FMCA). We used advanced technology and analysis methods (FEA, CFD, all methods of destructive and non-destructive testing, rotor-dynamics, and vibration analysis). We propose and implement upgrade and improvement projects (dry gas seals, anti-surge systems, advanced bearing designs, electronic governors, advanced coatings and materials). We support new construction projects so that reliability is built-in at the start. We react to breakdown events and make repairs to get equipment back up and running. Reliability involves everything from design to decommissioning. We are truly involved from cradle to grave.

If you want to consider a career in reliability, I would suggest working toward your professional license even if you plan to work in an industry that does not require it. Get as much technical training as you can. Attend conferences and symposiums where you can meet other reliability professionals and build a network of contacts. Read “Reliability Centered Maintenance” by Moubray and “Maximizing Machinery Uptime” by Bloch and Geitner.


Johnny Pellin

 

[geesamand]

Johnny, I think we do agree.

My experience working with clients in the general petroleum industry is that the culture there does invest in the long term for reliability, safety, and overall lowest cost. The companies may be large, making it a challenge at times to get your preferred initiatives to move forward, but there is already current of support there. If anything, there is so much going on at petroleum industry companies that the volume of opportunities and rapid change is the challenge.

I was warning against working for companies that lack the culture for maintenance and reliability. I would avoid them entirely. And at companies that are luke-warm to the value of reliability engineering, it's important to know who your advocates are and how they are positioned to support the cause. In any situation, it's always wise use metrics to show the results, and keep tracking them to confirm things are still working. (This doesn't mean metrics guarantee 100% support, but metrics and value propositions are the currency of business management and build trust in you. If you can speak that language, it will be recognized at all higher levels in the company. Engineering and maintenance talk only resonates to a point.)

I do believe this particular career path (rotating equipment reliability) is both interesting and full of long-term opportunity. It's also transportable across industries more than other career paths. I would be excited to hire someone with my design engineering team if they had a reliability and maintenance background. If you're in the USA, reliability and continuous improvement is one of the major efforts that make our successful companies profitable. They don't teach much in engineering school - in fact the first things to learn is why the things you learned are not enough to be useful (a good example, once you learn to calculate a bearing's L10 life, learn why it's usually inaccurate and how to calculate an L10a life instead). Spend time learning as much as you can about machining, inspection, fabrication/welding, machine design, and if possible reliability in school. I had to work to learn these things after college because my exposure was so limited in school.

David

 

[tbuelna]

In the aerospace industry, the reliability guys are usually part of QA/manufacturing. Their job is to validate that both the design and manufacturing process used results in a product that is safe and reliable. I'm a mechanical systems design engineer, and most of the reliability engineers I have worked with were good at their jobs. The good ones will point out little things about your design that you may not have considered, but have the potential to create a big problem under certain circumstances.

Personally, I think a good reliability engineer is worth their weight in gold. Problems with the reliability or safety of an aircraft product that occur in service can cost a company huge amounts of money. Unfortunately, many design engineers do not appreciate what they do since they are often forced to change their design late in the development process based on what a reliability engineer recommends.

 

[oscyes]

Hello everybody,

I am Glad to see to many comments and I thank you all for writing your point of view in this topic, i will be studying maybe one day i could be an R & M engineer

thanks

 

[oscyes]

i have always being in trouble when trying to apply the mtbf in a plant, for example i worked in refinery (oil and gas) as a student in training and we had to calculate the mtbf of rotative equipment at each plant, using shutdowns time.

the purpose was trying to have an indicator which we could meassure, but the thing was that shutdowns are not always due to rotative equipment and i thought it was not a reliable calculation. (for the rotative equipment coordination)

i would appreciate a lot if anybody could give me some advice in how to use the mtbf (mean time between failure) propperly and how to interpret the final calculation.

thanks in advance

 

[Tunalover]

Not to let you down, but I do agree with geesamand in that MOST companies do not value the R&M role. Only those like oil and aerospace where engineers "rule the roost" actually value the R&M role. I've worked for defense contractors (not aerospace) where the R&M engineer was used almost as a formality to "dot the i's and cross the t's" with risk assessment during early product design and proposals.



Tunalover

 

[Tmoose]

I'm not sure that MTBF is appropriate for small populations of components messed with by humans applying/mis-applying routine maintenance during their service life and overhauling equipment when it fails. Unless it somehow tags each failure with the employee number, or some other means of tracking who touched it most, and who touched it last.

 

[JJPellin]

I have been tracking MTBF for over 20 years. I do not care for it. It tends to be a lagging indicator. We have valuable programs that tend to drive it down rather than up. The tricky part is a consistent definition of a failure. If you reward your maintenance or operations personnel based on improving MTBF, they can manipilate the data. I knew of one plant that defined a failure so that any work performed in the field did not count. The mechanics mounted vices on the backs of their trucks and performed full pump overhauls in the field.

With that said, it sounds like you are describing uptime or availability rather than MTBF. A unit shutdown such as a turnaround should not count against MTBF.

Johnny Pellin

 

[tbuelna]

In my experience working as a mechanical systems engineer in aerospace, the guys doing safety and reliability work were not the same guys doing operations, maintenance and service work. Safety and reliability work would include FMECA studies, and even fracture control plans. O&M work was more related to predicting costs to maintain the product over its service life, writing maintenance manuals, etc.