5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer with Peter Horsburgh
As a reliability engineer, you have to come in contact with failures that repeat over and over again. Sometimes you can’t find the best solution to solve a problem because there are other people involved in the issue as well. It might be due to the lack of communication because reliability engineers are not always good at people skills. There are various other fields that a reliability engineer might not be good at. So, there are many reasons a solution can’t be implemented right or doesn’t get you the desired results. That’s why Peter Horsburgh has written a book titled as “5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer.”
In this episode, we covered:
- What Extraordinary Reliability Engineer(RE) is
- The 5 Habits of an Extraordinary RE
- How to identify consequences (safety, environmental, operational, and non-operational)
- The best practice for engineers to provide the best resolution
These habits can really help you be successful in your daily routine in the organization or while working in a plant that suffers from failures. Before you learn about the habits you need to follow, you should know the habits not to practice. These are doing opposite of what you are supposed to do. The habits that you need to actually practice are; identify problems, understand problems, ask questions, decide with data, and facilitate to implement. To explain these in detail, you need to know what the problems are. It might be the case that you don’t even know the real issues that a plant or facility might be going under.
Most of the organizations don’t think a problem is significant enough to deal with at times. Then, those same problems get big with time and appear at the moments when you are not prepared to solve them or it took you by surprise. Good reliability engineers identify the problems in their initial stages and proactively mitigate them before they cost you money and time. Then the engineers need to really understand the problems. You can’t expect the implemented solution to work unless you have thoroughly studied the problem at hand.
It happens sometimes that engineers treat certain problems casually because they don’t realize how serious they can get with time. A good reliability engineer always takes issues seriously and come up with the most effective solutions to resolve it. Another problem that engineers face is the difficulty to bring change in the practices in the facilities. Many organizations practice the same procedures, processes, and policies that they did years ago. That happens because no one was asking questions all this time. Then those old practices stop working altogether because no one knows how to deal with advanced issues.
What the engineers need to do is find the best possible alternatives to the same problem so that they can save money and time. A good reliability engineer understands the importance of data. It is not easy to get the support of management and other people without facts and those facts can only be obtained using the data to the best of your abilities. All of the above efforts would mean nothing in the end if you are not working and collaborating well with everyone else. You need to provide guidance to everyone and get help when needed.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio
- HP Reliability
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance Free eBook
- inspired Blended Learning (iBL®)
- James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
Peter Horsburgh Links:
- 5 Habits of an Extraordinary Reliability Engineer by Peter Horsburgh
- Reliabilityextranet.com
- Peter Horsburgh’s LinkedIn
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