How to justify a Reliability Engineer position

[Mark Ellens]

I have an excellent design engineer and we want to expand his role into design for reliability. Our objective is to become more proactive at the design level for reliability. My challenge now is to justify this new role to senior management. I need good data, case-studies, information, etc. that clearly shows how designing for reliability benefits profitability. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[Andrew Rowland]

I appreciate your situation. I tried for three years to get management to nibble with no success. Finally, a project came along that allowed me use reliability "tools" (e.g., fault trees, FMECAs, RBD, etc.). The project started in January this year and, as I write this, I am working on a document that defines the roles and responsibilities of the Reliability & Maintainability Engineering Program. This program (which our benchmarking shows is the first of its kind in my industry) didn't exist until my project started producing outputs. It was a case of a picture being worth a thousand words.

I tried to present data, case-studies, information, etc. When I applied the techniques to OUR equipment and exposed all of the weaknesses, it became very real and very personal to management. It's an approach you may want to consider.

Good luck!!! Feel free to e-mail if you have any other questions.