Job Description of a Reliability Engineer

The primary role of the Reliability Engineer is to identify and manage asset reliability risks that could
adversely affect plant or business operations. This broad primary role can be divided into three
smaller, more manageable roles: Loss Elimination, Risk Management and Lifecycle Asset
Management (LCAM).

Loss Elimination
One of the fundamental roles of the Reliability Engineer 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.

Risk Management
Another role of the Reliability Engineer is to manage risk to the achievement of an organizations
strategic objectives in the areas of environmental health and safety, asset capability, quality and
production. Some tools used by a Reliability Engineer to identify and reduce risk include:
PHA - Preliminary hazards analysis
FMEA - Failure modes and effects analysis
CA - Criticality analysis
SFMEA - Simplified failure modes and effects analysis
MI - Maintainability information
FTA - Fault tree analysis
ETA - Event tree analysis

Life Cycle Asset Management

Studies show that as much as 95% of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or Life Cycle Cost (LCC)
of an asset is determined before it is put into use. This reveals the need for the Reliability Engineer
to be involved in the design and installation stages of projects for new assets and modification of
existing assets.

Reliability Engineer Responsibilities and Duties

Heres a list of responsibilities and duties commonly found in the job description of a Reliability
Engineer:
Works with Project Engineering to ensure the reliability and maintainability of new and
ife Cycle
modified installations. The Reliability Engineer is responsible for adhering to the L
Asset Management (LCAM) process throughout the entire lifecycle of new assets.
Participates in the development of design and installation specifications along with
commissioning plans. Participates in the development of criteria for and evaluation of
equipment and technical MRO suppliers and technical maintenance service providers.
Develops acceptance tests and inspection criteria.
Participates in the final checkout of new installations. This includes factory and site
acceptance testing that will assure adherence to functional specifications.
 Guides efforts to ensure reliability and maintainability of equipment, processes, utilities,
facilities, controls, and safety/security systems.
Professionally and systematically defines, designs, develops, monitors and refines an Asset
Maintenance Plan that includes:
Value-added preventive maintenance tasks
Effective utilization of predictive and other non-destructive testing methodologies
designed to identify and isolate inherent reliability problems
Provides input to a Risk Management Plan that will anticipate reliability-related, and
non-reliability-related risks that could adversely impact plant operation.
Develops engineering solutions to repetitive failures and all other problems that adversely
affect plant operations. These problems include capacity, quality, cost or regulatory
compliance issues. To fulfill this responsibility the Reliability Engineer applies:
Data analysis techniques that can include:
Statistical Process Control
Reliability modeling and prediction
Fault Tree Analysis
Weibull Tree Analysis
Six Sigma (6) Methodology
Root-cause and Root-Cause Failure Analysis (RCA, RCFA)
Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System (FRACAS)
Works with Production to perform analyses of assets including:
Asset Utilization

Overall Equipment Effectiveness
Remaining useful life
Other parameters that define operating condition, reliability and costs of assets
Provides technical support to production, maintenance management and technical
personnel.
Applies value analysis to repair/replace, repair/redesign, and make/buy decisions.