Asset Management: Designing for Reliability...60 Seconds with Gary Knight of ROSEN Group

​Ahead of the seminar on Asset Management: Designing for Reliability, we caught up with Gary Knight, Principal Reliability Engineer at ROSEN Group. Gary explained his role and involvement with regards to the seminar, critical engineering challenges, what he is looking forward to at the event and why it is important for engineers to attend.

Could you briefly explain your role, involvement and experience with regards to this seminar?

Gary Knight (GK): I am a Principal Reliability Engineer with ROSEN, my main role is delivering reliability related engineering services for owner-operators of industrial assets. The projects I have worked on in the past have ranged from front line problem solving using root cause analysis, developing maintenance strategies using reliability centred maintenance principles and also demonstrating reliability and availability on major projects using reliability, availability and maintainability simulation.

Q: What are the main engineering challenges facing the industry at the moment and what are the most common issues you hear from colleagues?

GK: Skills shortage and a drive to reduce cost, both of which are not necessarily mutually exclusive! All organisations who need engineers in order to function – be it design & manufacture or run & maintain – seem to be struggling to recruit people with the requisite skills. Also, there never seems to be enough people or budget to cover all of the requirements of a complex organisation. Added to this, even busy engineers who know they need help from external sources struggle to actually find the time to “be helped” or justify the expenditure for external support.

Q: What key topics are you excited to speak about?

GK: Setting the context of how Life Cycle Costing fits into an overall reliability strategy for an organisation, and helping people who operate at all levels of an organisation to understand the concept and how it can be applied. As with any methodology, there are benefits and limitations to the approach and I also hope to help reliability and maintenance professionals understand how to make an appropriate financial and technical case.

Q: Who else are you most interested in hearing from on the programme, and why?

GK: James Pugh and Scott Mitchell – both for the same reason, as they are from organisations who are heavily product design oriented. I’m interested in how they incorporate learning from their product lifecycles back into the development process.

Q: What is your top tip in terms of designing for reliability?

GK: Commit to it! As an organisation, all personnel and departments need to be aligned to the same goal which should be, following safety and environmental stewardship, maximising upon financial investment. If we consider the other end of the spectrum of robust and reliable design to be “lowest installed cost”, a balance needs to be struck somewhere in the middle to achieve this goal. This balance can only be achieved based upon good, timely information which is a result of effort as opposed to luck. Such efforts come from having the right people doing the right work at the right time.

Q: Why is it important for engineers to join this seminar?

GK: Engineers who are new to industry will learn from the experience of the speakers and the wider delegation, and will be better informed to drive the future of UK engineering in the right way as a result. More experienced engineers can share ideas, based around the core seminar topics, and explore approaches from other industry sectors that will undoubtedly add to their overall understanding of what is possible enriching their own organisations and careers.

Q: What developments are you most interested in for the future and why?

GK: I’m watching the development of capabilities related to the use of operational data with interest, whilst trying to maintain a foot firmly in the practical domain. I believe that advances in technology that provide readily available, easily interpretable information will help to shape the future of reliability, and perhaps, all engineering. But we need to remember that the insights that such advances will bring still needs competent and proficient people, and engineers fall nicely into this category, to make the best use of it.

• Hear from asset management, design and reliability specialists from organisations across engineering sectors including ROSEN Group, Sellafield Ltd, Caterpillar Defense, Dyson, Rolls-Royce, Network Rail and more
• Learn how achieving clear definitions of life cycle conditions, loads and costs, can assist in saving costs and man-hours, reduce maintenance needs and guarantee safety
• Address challenges in capturing data in context, and using trending data to measure design robustness
• Build upon and improve existing design and strategies for whole life cycle costs
• Take part in interactive discussions during our roundtable sessions focusing in on key challenges relating to designing for reliability

To book your place, please visit www.imeche.org/assetmanagement.