The origins of a reliability engineer

During the Battle of Britain in 1940, the German Luftwaffe focused on placing unexploded bombs throughout the British cities. If citizens were to engage one of these unexploded bombs, they were likely to be killed or severely wounded. Some of these bombs had delayed fuses, while others had laced triggers that initiated the explosion on contact. Some indeed were duds, yet incited panic and a level of paranoid that every step could lead to immediate death.

Origins of Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)

In late 1940, the Royal Engineers within the British military began bomb disposal training at the Melsham Royal Air Force in Wiltshire, England. This training came from dissecting exploded bombs or on-the-job training with live ordinances. This was not a job for the passive, but instead, a job that involves never knowing what the day may bring.

Soon after, the Royal Engineers established a more formal training at the Army Bomb Disposal School in Donnington. Soon after, each leg of Britain's military services began teaching a form of bombs with improvised timers, fuses, and other triggering components. Soon after, the U.S. military began bomb disposal training at the Chemical Warfare School at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. Through many iterations and leaders at the forefront, Major Thomas J. Kane of the U.S. Army Bomb Disposal established what is known today as Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). Major Kane recognized the importance of this training and the risk that it mitigated.

One of the main concepts that came from the U.S. Army Bomb Disposal was that civilians should not be expected to disarm bombs. Instead, it had to be a highly trained individual focused on pattern recognition, a thorough understanding of risk, and the skills to establish the discipline and practices to mitigate similar issues in the future.

Responsibilities of a Reliability Engineer

In heavy manufacturing, a significant failure of an asset requires an individual(s) with thorough investigation skills and technical competencies in pattern recognition, mitigation strategies, and an uncanny ability to find evidence before the failure that had been missed. This individual(s) requires a mindset that is curious and adaptive to details that are indicators of a rapidly deteriorating situation. For a leader of an organization to be successful, they must develop individuals who have the skills of the EOD. This individual(s) is an organization's Reliability Engineer.

The Reliability Engineer is a master of their craft. They have other skills beyond a thorough understanding of failure modes and risk mitigation.

Reliability Engineers work closely with maintenance teams to design and implement asset management plans, monitor asset performance, and categorize risk. The skill of a Reliability Engineer is unique and intended to be short-circuited with a distributed skill-set across the masses.

Certain failures of an asset can be a hazardous condition and the mitigation requires the utmost skill, risk recognition, and discipline. Shortening the skill set of these individuals can lead to repetitive failures and a situation of constant fire-fighting of the latest operational bomb that went off. The goal is to find the potential before the failure, act to secure the circumstances, and insert actions to mitigate future potential. This is the responsibility of the Reliability Engineer and the value they provide to a manufacturing organization.