The shift from repair to resilience: manufacturing’s biggest advantage

Reliabilityweb, recently purchased by Nineteen Group, was founded by Terrence O’Hanlon in 1999 with a single mission: to develop enough reliability leaders to create safe, sustainable and reliable work environments at global scale.

Over the next 25 years, that mission took shape and now forms one of the most engaged and distinctive professional communities in the maintenance and reliability world; with the company’s events and training reaching over 50,000 professionals since 2013 – a number that represents a generation of reliability leaders.

The make-up of the organisation today includes the Reliability Leadership Institute (RLI) which is the sole owner of Uptime Elements, the most implemented reliability and asset management system in the world, operational in over 6,000 companies and championed by over 4,000 Certified Reliability Leaders.

Terrence commented: “All the work that we do is designed to create reliability leaders as an identity, as opposed to just a branch of knowledge. Of course, knowledge is important, but what we’re really focused on is the problems that are created when a workforce lacks leadership. We know that everyone can be a reliability leader.

“Had I been brave in 1999 I might have called the business ‘Failureweb.com’, because the reality is, you can’t understand reliability unless you can understand failure. In truth, the absence of failure is all reliability really is.

“Industry tends to look at the cost of maintaining equipment, rather than the cost of unreliability, which is invisible to most organisations. Reliability is harder to track, and can be something of a slippery subject.”

Reliability vs maintenance

Terrence was very clear, when reliability and maintenance get mentioned in the same breath, to him, it’s akin to fingers being drawn down a chalkboard. As far as he’s concerned, while maintenance is about repairing, restoring, renewing, inspecting and replacing, reliability is the absence of failure/assurance of function. Maintenance is a cost, but reliability is an investment in revenue.

Assets will no doubt require maintenance and constant use will degrade those assets over time, potentially defeating its function. But ultimately, Terrence likened the two entities to running a car; as users we want them to be reliable over a sustained period of time – we don’t want to constantly visit the garage to have components tightened, aligned, replaced, renewed or restored.

Of course, there is a question around how much maintenance is too much, and as the saying goes ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Industrial maintenance has shifted from running a machine until it breaks, to more a scheduled programme of interference, and on to world of condition-based monitoring where any maintenance is defensible from an engineering standpoint, and adds life to the asset, rather than takes it away. At least that’s the theory.

“However, the words ‘predictive maintenance’ trigger me, because what are you really predicting?” Terrence added. “Just telling someone on the shopfloor of an impeding problem and that something needs replacing isn’t really getting to root of the problem.

“We don’t want defects occurring in the first place; surely the ultimate goal is for those predictive technologies to detect nothing! We don’t want dirt coming through into bearings, improperly torqued flanges or misaligned shafts. If those incidents didn’t occur, we wouldn’t have to detect them.

“Predictive maintenance gets referred to as reliability, but in actual fact maintenance comes down to failures in defective material inputs, processes, purchasing, design, installation and work practices. They created the problem most of the time.”

Terrence added that unless really tight processes, procedures, purchasing and a full asset lifecycle view is in place, then businesses run a 50/50 chance that any maintenance practices will degrade the asset rather than extend its life.

“Predictive maintenance is not reliability. It has its place currently but the goal is to stop the need to predict to begin with. At the end of the day, reliability is a design function. Your car is reliable because it was designed that way. It has nothing to do with you or your maintainer.

“You as the operator – and your maintainer at the dealership – have a role to play, but the reliability came from a design function, so we try to push the narrative of incorporating reliability all the way back in the design phase.”

Reliability trends

Terrence explained that a gap currently exists between technology investment and organisational readiness. The companies that are deploying IoT sensors, AI-powered analytics and digital twins at scale are often still running reactive maintenance programmes, undermining all that investment.

When discussing the subject of digital transformation at The Manufacturer, we often speak about the importance of looking beyond the technology to people, workforce and culture, around which the success of any digital-based project hinges.

Technology will not solve a leadership deficit and Reliability Leadership Institute’s own Digitalization Consortium research has shown that roughly 30% of industrial AI pilot projects never scale beyond that phase. The technology worked, but the organisations weren’t ready.

Terrence is adamant that reliability is a “people and culture” issue before it is a technology problem. And Reliabilityweb’s own research bears this out, identifying the root causes of implementation failure as lack of awareness, trust, leadership, competency and empowerment. It’s interesting that technology is the noticeable absentee from this list and, as Terrence put it: “Technology is almost never the problem; leadership is.”

Every company has someone in charge of people. So, it’s imperative that they partner with other elements of the business – purchasing, engineering, operations and senior management. Reliability should be built through collaboration.

“Ask any company, who is the person responsible for safety?” Terrence continued. “They won’t point to one individual. They will answer that safety is everyone’s responsibility. We feel that reliability should be spoken about in the exact same context – people and culture as well as engineering.”

Another trend in the reliability space is more encouraging. The generation of younger professionals entering this field are showing a need to understand the system, not just the task. They want reliability as an identity – something they are; not just something they do.

All the work that we do is designed to create reliability leaders as an identity, as opposed to just a branch of knowledge. Of course, knowledge is important, but what we’re really focused on is the problems that are created when a workforce lacks leadership. We know that everyone can be a reliability leader.

Reliability depends on organisational culture, decision-making and accountability across all levels. Without strong leadership and collaboration between departments, even the best tools and processes will fail to deliver consistent results.
Terrence O’Hanlon, Founder, Reliabilityweb

This is why Terrence has penned the Reliability Stories – 13 illustrated, fictional narratives that carry the principles of the framework through the human experience that changes how people see their work, not just what they know about it.

People entering industry today didn’t come up through the system in the same way as previous generations and as such are expecting a very different work experience. And current workplaces are not necessarily receptive to what that updated view is. “I’m not saying that either one is right or wrong,” Terrence added. “But we have to accommodate.”

Changing processes around reliability and asset management

Terence added that two decades ago, conversations in the space were centred around maintenance tactics – predictive tasks, intervals and condition monitoring. This then shifted toward strategy – reliability-centred maintenance, criticality analysis, planning and scheduling discipline. Today the conversation is about systems.

Leaders are now asking how reliability connects to asset lifecycle management, sustainability and ESG commitments, AI governance and digital transformation. Those are fundamentally different questions, and as such they require a fundamentally different reliability leader to answer them.

Terrence explained that the Uptime Elements framework has always reflected this systems view. Maintenance can’t be optimised without leadership; technology can’t be optimised without data governance; and performance can’t be sustained without people and culture. “That was a contrarian position in 2002,” added Terrence. “Today it is becoming conventional wisdom.

“I have been building a wildlife and nature sanctuary on a mile stretch along the Elkhorn River in Nebraska, managing what has become a serious operation of flower gardens, roses, a vineyard, apple, peach, pear and cherry trees, and significant vegetable gardens. Mother Nature has taught me as many lessons about the reality of maintaining something as industry ever has.

“A garden does not tolerate reactive maintenance. Miss the pruning window and you lose the season. Ignore the soil condition and no amount of water saves the crop. Fail to monitor for disease early and it spreads faster than you can respond.

“Every principle I have spent 40 years teaching in industrial settings – criticality analysis, condition monitoring, defect elimination, preventive care, the understanding that a small action at the right time prevents a catastrophic failure later – plays out in a garden with absolute clarity and no mercy. Nature is the most honest teacher of reliability I have ever encountered.”

Reliability as a competitive differentiator

Terrence added that reliability is one of the last remaining sustainable competitive advantages in manufacturing. Every competitor has access to the same equipment, technology vendors and ERP systems.

However, he added: “What can’t be replicated in an organisation is where reliability is an identity; when it’s been woven into an organisation’s people and the way that they work. Some companies take reliability more seriously than others, and you can tell when you walk into an operation.

“It’s a culture where assets perform as designed, failures are anticipated rather than reacted to, and reliability strategy is integrated into capital planning and the operational decisions at executive level.”

Organisations that achieve this consistently operate with significantly higher asset availability, lower total maintenance costs, better safety records and sustainability outcomes, and greater organisational agility. Put another way, reliability is not what you do when assets break, it is what you do so they don’t. That shift in thinking, at scale, across an entire organisation, is extraordinarily difficult to copy.

Reliabilityweb is developing a new framework called Zero Breakdown Leadership which pushes this mindset even further. Zero breakdowns is a declaration rather than a KPI – a refusal to accept that unplanned failures are inevitable.

The organisations that adopt zero as their standard – not as a statistic to manage but as an identity to inhabit – invest, train, design assets and hold themselves accountable in a different way. The gap between an organisation that manages failure and one committed to eliminating it is one of the largest competitive differentiators that a manufacturer can have in the modern world.

“Are you going to eliminate all breakdowns? Probably not; the world is unforgiving,” Terrence added. “There are always going to be factors beyond an organisation’s control, so zero breakdowns are not necessarily achievable. However, why not aim for it and see how far you get?”

Not only that but sustainability is now part of this competitive picture in a way that hasn’t been prevalent in the past. Regenerative reliability makes the business case that reliability done right is sustainability done right – extending asset life, eliminating waste, reducing energy consumption and protecting people from harm are not separate agendas from operational performance. Organisations that understand this first will have a significant advantage as regulatory and customer pressure on sustainability outcomes intensifies.

“Industrial assets consume 80% of our carbon footprint on this planet,” Terrence added. “And who better to be the custodians than the maintenance managers, reliability leaders and the asset managers. They can make a major difference.

“This is about aligning our reliability philosophy with the way the world works. We don’t have to sub-optimise our maintenance, reliability and asset management, but we can make a major contribution to sustainability, which I think manufacturers are all after.”

How can manufacturers maximise their reliability?

The Uptime Elements framework organises what manufacturers need to have in place across seven interconnected domains: Leadership for Reliability, Reliability Engineering for Maintenance, Asset Condition Management, Work Execution Management, Asset Management, IoT Digitalization Strategy and People and Culture at Work. They are not a checklist — they are a system, and the system only works when the domains work together.

The non-negotiables for any manufacturer serious about this issue are executive sponsorship with genuine accountability, not verbal support and visible, committed leadership that allocates resources, removes barriers and holds the organisation to a reliability standard. Without this, everything else stalls.

Also vital is a criticality analysis – knowing which assets matter most to the mission of the business and why. Without that, manufacturers cannot prioritise, and without prioritisation they are managing everything, which means they are managing nothing.

Manufacturers also need a reliability strategy for critical assets that goes well beyond time-based and reactive maintenance. RCM, predictive technologies and defect elimination are not luxury investments, they are the foundation.

The gap between work that is planned and work that is actually executed as planned is where reliability dies in most organisations. Therefore, planning and scheduling discipline is an imperative – close that gap and performance improves almost immediately.

And of course, it’s important to go back to the people and culture commitment that treats reliability as a professional identity – not just a department. The Reliability Leadership Manifesto, which Terrence has recently published, begins with this declaration: a reliability leader is one who helps another person, a machine or a system to do a better job.

“Notice that this definition does not require a title, department or crucially, permission,” he added. “When that orientation is present at every level of an organisation, reliability becomes self-sustaining. When it is absent, no amount of technology or process will compensate.”

The future for reliability

Manufacturing is being disrupted by energy market shocks, AI, autonomous systems, sustainability mandates and the largest workforce generational transition in living memory. The organisations that navigate that disruption successfully will be the ones that have built reliability into their operating DNA – not as a department, but as a leadership capability distributed across the whole organisation.

Manufacturing will increasingly require leaders who can bridge the technical and the strategic – who understand both the physics of failure and the human dynamics of culture change. The reliability leader of 2030 will be as comfortable speaking with a CFO about total cost of ownership and asset lifecycle value as they are with a technician about vibration signatures.

AI will reshape the technical work of reliability profoundly – condition monitoring, predictive analytics, autonomous maintenance scheduling. The RLI is developing AI-powered tools that bring the Uptime Elements Body of Knowledge to life in new ways – making performance assessment, on-the-job learning and change implementation guidance available to reliability professionals in forms that were not possible even five years ago.

Terrence added: “Manufacturers want to make things. And fundamentally, any maintenance activity stops that from happening. Manufacturers need to see why these maintenance actions are necessary, but also to be empowered to see when they’re not. Manufacturers just want to keep production lines open, but eventually they’ll degrade the equipment if it’s not maintained properly.

“Where’s the balance? Right now, it’s decided by maintenance. In the future, manufacturing teams are going to get smarter, and they’ll have an equal voice on when machines and lines get shut down, and when renewals and replacements occur. We’ll certainly see more of a partnership going forward.”

The Certified Reliability Leader course

The Certified Reliability Leader is a professional designation for leaders committed to advancing reliability as a way of being – not just as a technical skill set. It is built on the full Uptime Elements framework and administered through the Association of Asset Management Professionals (AAMP), which manages the examination, knowledge badges and black belt project pathways.

The advanced workshop runs over four days with four primary objectives:

• Building a cohort of reliability leaders who take action
• Leaving the programme being a reliability leader – not just knowing about reliability
• Earning the CRL designation
• Leaving with a clear 90-day commitment – known as the 3-Month Orbit – focused on the one action that will move their organisation forward most

Day one of the workshop is built around the Reliability Leadership Manifesto – a declaration of who reliability leaders are and what they stand for; the conviction that every person in an organisation can be a reliability leader regardless of title or position. The Manifesto creates identity before the technical content begins, because identity is what makes technical knowledge stick.

There are now over 4,000 CRL holders across the world. Since 2013, the training programmes that feed into and surround that certification have reached over 50,000 professionals. What matters most about that community is not the credential itself, it is the shared language, framework and accountability that connects those professionals across industries and geographies.

“What sets CRL apart is its focus on leadership,” Terrence added. “It equips professionals at any level with the tools, language and confidence to move their organisations from reactive maintenance to proactive, reliability-led operations.”