Insanity is doing the same old things in the same old way and expecting different results.

Rita Mae Brown

The following is offered as a model job description for a reliability manager, engineer, or specialist who facilitates the change process. Many of Beta's plants are implementing this position, or a variant thereto, to assure focus and facilitation of the reliability improvement process for manufacturing excellence. While likely useful, it is not essential that the individual be an engineer, but it is strongly recommended that they have 10+ years experience in an operating plant, have a strong work ethic, and be capable of being both team leader and team member. It is likely that the individual will not be able to initially do everything identified below, and that the role will evolve as the improvement process takes effect. Ultimately, the role may not even be necessary, if and when, the practices become second nature and habit. In any event, this individual might be expected to be performing the following kinds of tasks:

Loss Accounting. One of the fundamental roles of a good reliability engineer is to focus on uptime/output losses and the causes of those losses via Pareto analysis. This does not mean that they would necessarily create the data base for identifying the losses, but rather would use existing data bases to the extent possible for the analysis. For example, a review of a given plant might indicate that most of the unplanned losses are a result of stationary...