Reliability Engineering & Maintenance Management

Programme Overview

Maintenance expenditure in asset intensive industries is frequently the largest controllable cost in the operating budget, yet in many organisations it is managed reactively, driven by habit and historical precedent rather than by evidence of what prevents failure and what does not. The result is a maintenance programme that is simultaneously overspecified in some areas and dangerously underspecified in others, spending money on tasks that add no reliability value while missing the interventions that would prevent the failures that cause the most operational and commercial damage. This programme provides a comprehensive treatment of reliability engineering and maintenance management, from failure analysis and reliability centred maintenance through to loss reduction, defect elimination, maintenance strategy development, work management and performance measurement. It is designed for senior maintenance and reliability professionals who need to build maintenance programmes that are technically justified, commercially optimised and demonstrably effective. Participants develop the knowledge and skills to apply RCM methodology, conduct FMEA and FMECA analyses on real world failure scenarios, design maintenance strategies based on failure pattern analysis and P-F interval theory, apply Weibull life data modelling to maintenance decision making, and build the work management and performance measurement systems that sustain reliability improvement over time. Organisations that apply this learning consistently achieve measurable improvements in asset availability, reductions in unplanned maintenance expenditure and a maintenance programme that can be defended to regulators, insurers and asset owners on the basis of technical evidence rather than convention.

Topics Covered

• Strategic value of asset reliability

  • the business case for reliability
  • Linking asset performance to organisational value, risk and cost
  • Understanding the cost of unreliability across production, safety and regulatory dimensions
• Reliability engineering analysis

  • failure behaviour and probability concepts
  • Reliability block diagrams
  • Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA and FMECA)
  • Fault tree analysis
  • Root cause analysis methods
  • Equipment failure data collection and classification
• Loss reduction and defect elimination

  • understanding production and reliability losses
  • Loss mapping and quantification
  • Defect elimination methodology and structured problem solving
  • Bad actor analysis
  • Elimination of chronic failures through design out, process improvement and operational discipline
  • Sustaining gains through standardisation and management of change
• Maintenance strategy development

  • reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) principles and methodology
  • Maintenance task selection and interval optimisation
  • Risk-based inspection approaches
  • Condition based and predictive maintenance technology selection
  • Maintenance strategy documentation and review
• Work management and resource optimisation

  • maintenance work order lifecycle
  • Planning and scheduling best practice
  • Backlog management
  • Shutdown and turnaround planning
  • Spares and materials management
  • Contractor management
  • CMMS and EAM configuration for effective work execution
• Maintenance budgeting and cost control

  • maintenance cost classification
  • Budgeting approaches for maintenance
  • Lifecycle cost modelling
  • Cost of failure analysis
  • Budget variance reporting
  • Financial justification of predictive and preventive maintenance investment
• Performance measurement and continuous improvement

  • maintenance KPI frameworks
  • Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
  • Asset availability, MTBF and MTTR
  • Planned maintenance ratio
  • Performance dashboards and benchmarking
  • Applying continuous improvement principles to maintenance management

Learning Outcomes

• Apply reliability engineering principles to understand and improve the performance of physical assets
• Conduct reliability-centred maintenance analysis to select maintenance tasks that address the right failure modes
• Apply failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) to engineering systems and asset classes
• Develop maintenance strategies that optimise the balance between planned maintenance cost and asset reliability
• Use reliability data and performance metrics to drive continuous improvement in maintenance effectiveness
• Manage the transition from time-based to condition-based and predictive maintenance programmes
• Build organisational capability in reliability engineering and maintenance management