Podcast: Maintenance vs. reliability engineers — Key differences and how they work together

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers insight into understanding the difference between maintenance and reliability engineers and how to best use their strengths.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: So you've offered a lot of great advice over the course of this podcast, and oftentimes what I love most about it is the simplicity. I think sometimes people overthink these issues, and you're very good at saying, No, it's simple. Do this or focus on this, and you boil these very complex topics down to manageable pieces or give people a concrete place to start.

Today we're talking about the differences between maintenance and reliability engineers. I hope everyone has their coffee, or whatever you're drinking this morning, and they're ready for today's advice. I know Joe will give us some good direction.

As I said, our topic today is maintenance versus reliability engineers. We don't want to pit them against each other, necessarily, but how do maintenance and reliability engineers differ? What are their strengths? What are the weaknesses of both?

We recently did an episode on organizational structure and how many employees you should have and what your team should look like, so I don't think we'll get into numbers here today. You can listen to that episode from December 2024, but let's dive into how to use maintenance and reliability engineers differently based on their strengths and weaknesses, and how do you best get the two working together?

JK: Yeah, great question, and there are a few traps in here that I will specifically point out. So a maintenance engineer, the primary focus of a maintenance engineer is to keep the equipment running, to work with the technicians to make sure that they know the right procedures if something unexpected comes up, like a downtime event or planned maintenance for this weekend. Do they have the procedures? You're part of that help chain for the crafts out there. They do a lot of reacting. They address issues as they arise that come up. They’ve got to be flexible and have the ability to adapt, but to keep the equipment running today, this week, this month, this quarter, their time span of control. They are there as a technical resource to help things go okay.

Now, contrast that with a reliability engineer. These people are working on the strategic problems or opportunities, however you want to say it, that the plant may have, that the equipment may have. What are the problems we have at the end of every year when we sit down and say, ‘What were our number one issue? What was our number one? Number two, number three.’ The top reliability, expensive production issue, and they're always the same. It’s lubrication failures, motor failures, pump failures. What is it at your location? And the reliability engineer uses data, looks at the CMMS that you have. How much downtime will we have and how much money we spend, and what's the PM on that? What's the failure mode of that? What can we do to improve that? Maybe it's adding predictive technologies. Maybe it's a design change. Maybe it's a skill change, something we need to do a little bit differently. Maybe it's balancing differently. But it's a different time span that they're working in.

Here's the trap. The number one trap I want to talk about is reliability engineers getting sucked in to the day to day. Like a moth to a flame, we have this disaster. We need all hands on deck for the disaster of the day. And you suck the reliability engineer into that. They end up working on the here and now, on a on a non-Top 10 issue it. It’s non top 10 for the year, but it's top 10 today, and then it's 4:30 in the afternoon, and they'll say, ‘I'll try to do the reliability stuff tomorrow.’ So that is a massive trap.

One of the biggest boosts we got in our reliability effort at the plant I worked at was when we separated reliability and maintenance engineers. I mean, actually, physically, they were different people. One of the things that's popular is to say, ‘Hey, Anna, your job is, you're a maintenance engineer and a reliability engineer. You do both.’ And I've never seen that work, 100% of the time. I've been to 32 plants, at least 32 that was my last count, and 100% of them, it fails because you get sucked into the here and now, the drama of what's going on. That's one trap.

Another trap with reliability engineers is a failure happens, and it causes 12 hours of downtime. It's very emotional, but the last time that failure happened was 30 years ago, just to exaggerate a little bit. So you’ve got a once every 30-year mean time between failure, and the plant manager gets all excited and says, ‘We need to do an RCA on that. We need to revise the PM program. You need to go in and spend the next month trying to improve that.’ That's a waste of time. You've got other events that are going to be one, two and three on the year. You've got other things that have a mean time between failure of six months, a year, two years. Don't get sucked into the emotion of the day, and that's the reliability engineer's job is to focus on that strategic and then remind the executive team this is not a strategic priority. I'm going to do what you asked me to do, but remember, that's not one through five. This is number 25 and this happens every 30 years.

The main difference, simple difference, between a maintenance engineer and reliability engineer is the time zone that they try to work in, the time span that they're trying to work in. One is strategic; one is tactical. Both are critical. One's not better than the other. A lot of people like that stamp of, I'm a reliability engineer. I went to one plant and they called everybody a reliability engineer. We had no maintenance engineers, and they did that just for egos. But they're both important.

So the strengths of each so. If you're a maintenance engineer, you’ve got to be a quick study. You’ve got to be an excellent troubleshooter. You’ve got to work well with others. You're working with a team, and they're looking to you and say, ‘Hey, this equipment's down and here's 47 ideas of what we think's wrong. And you've got to say, ‘Okay, how do we methodically eliminate some of those? What's our approach going to be?’ You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to decide, and you’ve got to be adaptable. That’s what I look for in a maintenance engineer.

A reliability engineer is data driven. They're focused. They have a lot of alone time. You're on a computer a lot, looking inside the CMMS system. That's your gold mine. Your gold mine is the CMMS. You're freed up to think strategically. You're focused on root cause. You’ve got to have good communication skills.

So those are the skills I see of each, and a lot of times, those are different people. Some engineers love being the person that rides in on the white horse and saves the day. Well, the reliability engineers, they're the silent heroes. They prevent problems from happening. So, for example, if you have 20 motor failures in a year, and you only have five the next year. Does anybody notice the failure you didn't have? No. It's kind of an unsung hero. That person prevented 15 failures, and you didn't even know about it. So the reliability engineer actually has to be good at marketing, marketing and sales, and it's not just blowing your own horn. It's saying, ‘Hey, I'm not sure anybody noticed, but we went from 20 motor failures in 2023 to five in 2024, and here's the actions we changed. We started doing this balancing. We started this ultrasonic greasing process. And we have a vibration route that we put everything on. Whatever it happens to be, but connect the dots for people. So don't forget marketing of successes, because the leadership team won't know the failures that you didn't have. Okay, very important, so that's one of the traps, okay, is not marketing.

I've been a part of organizations where they were going through tough times and had to lay off people, and you lay off the reliability engineer. Well, this is the person that's mining gold for you. But you may not even know it. You may not know it. ‘We produced 10% more product last year. Gosh, those production guys are doing great.’ Well, that's because the uptime is higher.

How do they work together, a reliability engineer and a maintenance engineer? Well, they obviously are joined at the hip, the maintenance engineers, they're feeding the reliability engineers information, but the reliability engineers have got to be careful not to get hooked into the day to day, and that is a challenge. Okay, one of the things, this is an action you can take on Monday. If you have a reliability engineer and a maintenance engineer, make a rule that says you cannot pull the reliability engineer into day to day activity without approval from the plant manager.

I did that at every single plant I influenced. You make a rule. Because they're the easy button. They're a lot of times very talented people, and you pull them into the day to day and guess what? You're pulling them out of the gold mine to work on the day to day. Not saying the day to day is not important, but mining gold is, and that's a trap.

They do work together. Sometimes the reliability engineer is, by not being in the day to day, they go off into fantasy land, and the maintenance engineer can keep them grounded. ‘Here's how the PMs are actually being conducted. Here's what I see missing.’ So it's a dose of daily reality that the maintenance engineer can provide to the reliability engineer. But the main thing is, you’ve got to leave that reliability engineer alone. One of the rules I had also was they could not come to the daily meeting. So the daily meeting is the daily drama, talking about what happened yesterday, what's going to happen today. And that just pulls them away from their job. I've always seen them work together extremely well. That has never really been a problem. The problem I've had with reliability engineers is them getting sucked in to the day to day, and also get sucked into the once in 20-, 30-year event, and root causing that, and getting their eye off the strategic problems that your plant has year after year.

PS: Great, so you can't be both a maintenance and a reliability engineer. I think that's a good point to reiterate. And you talked a great deal about the partnership that is between those two and how they work together. I'm if you've ever seen conflict or conflict of interest between reliability and a maintenance engineer, and how do you deal with that? Or do you feel like because of their positions, they generally tend to work pretty well together, and you don't see a lot of conflict?

JK: Yeah, I’ve always seen them work together extremely well. I've never really seen conflicts. Sometimes they want to play in in each other's sandbox, and they do that. It doesn't offend them in any way. But as the leader, you need to say, ‘No, you think strategic. Uou think tactical and solving the problems of this day, this week, this month, they like to drift a little bit and, and I've just seen tremendous success by separating those people.

I have seen extreme mediocrity of them being one person. For example, if you have two areas of your plant, say it's the anode assembly and ring furnace, and you don't need to know what those are, but anode assembly and ring furnace, if you have two engineers, let's have one engineer in each area be both the maintenance engineer and the reliability engineer. Okay, that's one scenario that leads to mediocrity, or have one maintenance engineer, have both locations, both plants, doing maintenance engineering, and then one reliability engineer. I've seen a tremendous results doing that 100% of the time.

PS: Okay, thanks, Joe. Great advice, as always. So we started something new last episode, and we're talking about ourselves. So this is our 18th episode of Ask a plant manager. We've been doing this for a year and a half, and we want to give our loyal listeners a closer glimpse into us a little bit. So for now, we're going to try and keep this focus on work related questions, and we'll see how long we can keep that going. So this week's deep dive question is, what is something that you learned from work or your experiences that has influenced how you teach your kids about work? How much do you or have you tried to influence their choices about school or career, or how have your own career choices influenced them, maybe without even trying? I know Joe, you hit on this a little bit last episode. But what do you think?

JK: Well, I have four children, between the ages of 34 and 27. I have three boys. The first three are boys, and then I have a daughter that's 27. I have had a massive influence on their career choices. They are all four engineers. They graduated from Purdue University. I've had one go on and get a master's, and I've had one go on and get a PhD in Engineering, and he's a teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. My wife thinks I just manipulated them. Well, I started at a very early age. It's something that, I do that I noticed most people don't. I started talking to my kids about careers when they were, like seven or eight years old, and what kind of jobs, what are the consequences to the decisions you make, not good or bad, but just consequences. And my kids, I've steered them toward problem solving. Engineering, if you don't know what that is, it's really a degree in problem solving. It's how to take apart a problem into its components, how to use data, how to use logic, physics, the rules of how things work, and hone in on a root cause to a problem. Okay, that's what engineers do. There's always going to be jobs for good problem solvers. And it's exciting. You have days that are bad days, and you have great days. Lot of drama can be in an engineer's life. So it is exciting. You can go higher in responsibility as an engineer. You could go into leadership, like I did. You can go into sales. You can go into marketing. It really opens up the world to you getting an engineering degree, and I highly steered my kids in that direction.

Also, I've steered them in the direction, they were just like me. When you graduate and you're 22 years old, you go out into a plant, people look at you like you know what you're doing, and you have no clue. So I've also steered them. The answer is, this is like a Where's Waldo, or exercise of find the answer on the shop floor. The answer is in the hearts and minds of the technicians and the operators. They know what the problem is. They may not have all the pieces of the puzzle and you put it together. So all of them, you don't have developed that skill of going to the shop floor, and all of them love problem solving, and they have a degree in that. Now, coincidentally, my wife is a school teacher, so one of my children is teaching school at the college level.

PS: Well, that's good advice for me, and I’m just getting to that point with my kids. I have two, and my oldest, my daughter, she's graduating high school this year and headed to college. Right now, she's planning to get a degree in criminology, and she wants to go to the police academy and be a police officer. My youngest son, he is in fourth grade, so more something I've dealt with as far as my older one. My 10 year old, does have many ideas about the careers he wants, but it changes pretty frequently right now. He is very good at math and science, so I am hoping he's going to be my engineer, but he's got some time to figure that out.

I knew very early on, since I was probably five or six years old, that I wanted to be a writer. It was just something I knew, and so I don't even know that my parents could have influenced me that much. I don't know that I talked to my kids quite as in detail as you have, and for me, what I've always tried to encourage them is just to find passion. It’s not always been easy to be a writer and a journalist in the 21st century. I talked last month about how, this industry is always changing, and it can be grueling, and deadline driven and never ending. I think some might say the same about a career in manufacturing. So I don't see how anyone could do this job without a true passion, in my case, for content creation and journalism that teaches. You can do a tough job and you can endure a difficult situation, if you really have a passion for what you do, and I think you'll always be happy that way.

JK: I love that. One other thing that I neglected to mention is I'm a massive fan of job shadowing, and I brought my kids and probably 40 of my friends’ kids through my manufacturing plant and just walked around. I'd spend the day with them, and I find, say it was an accountant. I would walk up to the accountant and say, ‘Hey, tell Jane what you're doing right now. What are you doing right now?’ So they would understand a little bit more about what it was to be an accountant, an engineer. What are you doing right now? A lot of people think engineers spend a lot of time behind the desk. Well, very few of the engineers in manufacturing spend a lot of time behind the desk at my plants. So that job shadowing, so your child that is interested in law enforcement, can you get a ride along and experience a day in the life of? I've had, I'll say, 25% of the people that I brought along on a day in the life of an engineer or an accountant, they ran the other way and said, I don't want to do that. But they found that out at 16 or 17 years old, not when they were 25, so job shadowing is huge. I job shadowed with a medical doctor in an emergency room when I was about 17 years old for two weeks. I ran the other way.

PS: That would be me too.

JK: I ran the other way, screaming. Okay, so job shadowing is powerful for your kids.

PS: That’s a really good point. They have a school resource officer at our high school, and the kids all love him, and she is very close with him, and they have offered to do some ride alongs and take her out. So we're hoping to take advantage of that. But that is great advice for anybody you have this idea of what you think that career would be, but you really don't have an idea until you get on there.

JK: What's a day in the life of the role that you're looking at is powerful, powerful.

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