Reliability Department and Reliability Engineer

Looking at different industries and even factories, it can be concluded that some of the responsibilities and functionalities for reliability and maintenance department fall into a grey area.

In some of the settings reliability and maintenance functions are carried out by one department whereas in other situations there is a separate department for each of these teams and each focuses on certain aspects of asset management program.

There are variety of responsibilities and functions for a reliability department and a reliability engineer. Following, I have jotted down the functions that normally are carried out in a reliability department and also the responsibilities of a reliability engineer.

Reliability Department Function

A reliability department performs a variety of reliability-related functions. Some of these important functions are:

1. Developing reliability policy, plans, and procedures

2. Providing reliability related inputs to design proposals and specifications

3. Carrying out reliability allocation and prediction

4. Training reliability manpower

5. Conducting reliability-related research

6. Auditing reliability-related activities

7. Carrying out reliability demonstration and failure data collection and reporting

8. Monitoring the reliability activities of subcontractors (if any)

9. Monitoring reliability growth

10. Conducting specification and design reviews with respect to reliability

11. Consulting on reliability matters

12. Conducting failure data analysis

Tasks of a Reliability Engineer

A reliability engineer performs various types of tasks. Again, as stated before in many settings the maintenance engineer is responsible for all these.

Some of the important ones are:

1. Providing relevant reliability information to management

2. Budgeting the tolerable system failure down to the component level

3. Developing reliability prediction models and techniques

4. Running tests on the system, subsystems, and parts

5. Monitoring subcontractor’s reliability performance

6. Participating in evaluating requests for proposals

7. Determining reliability of alternative designs

8. Analysing customer complaints with reliability

9. Participating in design reviews

10. Performing analysis of a proposed design

In any situations, it pays to clearly define the tasks of reliability or maintenance engineer in any organisation so that there is no ambiguity in their responsibilities. As any ambiguity hurts the overall reliability of the systems.

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