Differences between Maintenance and Reliability Engineers – a brief literature review

Specialty overview

There is a definite distinction between Reliability Engineers (RE) and Maintenance Engineers (ME). Although they are highly dependant on each other. REs rely a lot on MEs and vice versa. However, those roles are often confused let also not well understood by recruiters, managers or regrettably, even professionals in the roles.

In a Reliabilityweb.com article, Paul Barringer provides a good summary of this distinction. He also underlines the vital partnership between those specialties. Some aspects highlighted by Barringer are:

• “The task of a reliability engineer is to prevent failures, but from a strategic standpoint”. This relates to analytics and projections rather than hands on tasks in the field. The reliability engineer focuses on long terms aspects of reliability, availability and maintainability.  
• “The task of a maintenance engineer is to quickly restore the failure to an operable condition”. As opposed to being strategic, this is a short-term or medium approach. Nevertheless, the ME’s goal is also to prevent failures. In addition, he is the “architect” of the practical tasks required to achieve a failure free environment. The RE comes up with theoretical solutions and the ME turns those into practical ones.
• “Both jobs have elements of each other. Each engineer must know about each other’s tools to adequately perform the task”. This also underlines the dependencies of each role. The RE is the eyes and ears of the ME in the boardroom. Whereas the ME is the eyes and ears of the RE in the field.

James Kovacevic and Shon Isenhour in their podcast relate to the partnerships and common traits of those two specialties. “Both reliability and maintenance engineers are basically trying to make repairs last longer and prevent failures from reoccurring.

“Both have to be good at communicating problems with other people”. This raises the importance of communication in this role. It also involves using simplified terms to highlight issues or opportunities to others outside of the M&R realm. Such as senior managers, accountants or even human resource professionals.

A typical dialogue between REs and MEs

In his Reliabilityweb.com article, Paul Lanthier provides some great examples of tasks where REs and MEs come to collaborate. Below, I provide a set of typical dialogues between Rob the RE and Mark the ME.

• Mark ME: “Rob, we need to work on the life analysis for those pumps. The budget meeting is next month and we need to submit a 5-year maintenance plan to management”  
• Rob RE: “Mark, I have the life characteristic you requested for this valve as well as a suggested maintenance plan. Let’s review it and see how we can implement this plan in a practical way in the field.”
• Rob RE: “Mark. In this RCA you are working on, using contour plots, I have found a dependency between bearing and seal failures. I suggest you include this in the RCA proceedings?”
• Mark ME: “Rob, I completed the mechanical seal conditioning monitoring pilot. It worked well and our test is 90% effective. We need to elaborate a justification strategy to proliferate this test to the rest of mechanical seals. This has to be presented to senior management.”
• Mark ME: “Rob, I have been informed that our pump spare part spend last year was too high. There appears to be spare parts sitting unused on the shelves for a number of years. Can you calculate the min/max levels for pump spares?”

Career Path

What can be added to this overview is the career progression path. To become an RE, one has to start by doing the job of an ME. It is crucial for the RE to be able to relate to the equipment but also the challenges faced by the ME in the field. Barringer illustrates reliability engineering as the “clean hands job” as opposed to the “plant” job of the ME. Paul Barringer also provides very detailed descriptions of both specialties should the reader need to consider hiring.  

It is not a must that an ME progress to an RE role. Most MEs love their job and excel at it. They love the proximity to the equipment and all the action in the field. Countless REs, like myself, who have transitioned from the role of MEs say they miss having their “head in a turbine” or “crawling through vessels” on a regular basis.

However, it is important to know and understand the role related to each job title. Too many times, I have seen professionals in a role where the title is in contradiction with what they are actually doing. This leads to confusion, and even disappointment. A person with a job title as an RE who is not performing as a RE might be terribly confused when he starts a conversation with the person who is practicing the role.