Reliability engineering deals with the estimation, prevention and management of high levels of

"lifetime" engineering uncertainty and risks of failure.

Reliability engineering focuses on costs of failure caused by system downtime, cost of spares,
repair equipment, personnel and cost of warranty claims. It relates closely to safety
engineering and to system safety, in that they use common methods for their analysis and may
require input from each other.

Reliability engineering focuses on costs of failure caused by system downtime, cost of spares,
repair equipment, personnel and cost of warranty claims.

Reliability Engineering and 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.

Reliability Engineering and Risk Management

Another key role assigned to the reliability engineer is to identify risk. This includes the
management of risk in many different areas of a company such as health, safety, production and
asset issues.

Fortunately for reliability engineers, there are many tools to help identify and manage risk. At
the head of the list are tools such as:

 Fault tree analysis (FTA)

 Event tree analysis (ETA)
 Simplified failure modes and effects analysis (SFMEA)
 Maintainability information (MI)
 Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
 Criticality analysis (CA)
 Preliminary hazards analysis (PHA)

Reliability engineering also has a big role in life cycle asset management. A reliability engineer
needs to be involved in the design and installation stages of projects for new assets and
modification of existing assets -- this in light of studies that report as much as 95% of the total
cost of ownership or life cycle cost of an asset is determined before it is put into use.

With so much responsibility, it’s not surprising that the median pay for reliability engineers in
the U.S. is just under $100K annually.
The future job market for reliability engineering as a profession is very strong and will offer
tremendous opportunities to reliability engineers with the "right" education, skills, attitudes and
implementation capabilities.

Could you or your organization benefit from Reliability Engineering Training? Tonex offers 17
different courses.

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.