Why Maintenance Engineers Must Get To Grips with Finance

Despite its traditional reputation among engineers, RS Connected Thinking explain how understanding finance could be a key turning point in your career.

All organisations, whether in the private or public sector, produce a budget for the year ahead which shows how much they expect to receive as revenue or funding and how much they plan to spend on each area of the business.

If you need to secure funding for any new projects at your organisation, understanding how to write a proposal for the money and when in the financial year is crucial.

“I think it’s really important for engineering managers and technicians to understand how the financial cycle in the business works in terms of budgeting and forecasting,” says Ian Bell, Vice President of Engineering and Facilities at RS Group.

However it is important to consider that projects need to deliver value to an organisation to justify the costs.

“In operations, engineering practices increasingly come back to understanding what the corporate objectives are and how, as a maintenance engineer, you support them. Year on year there will be big budget challenges but it’s about using your resources most efficiently to generate business value.” says Maintenance Engineering Academic Dr Moray Kidd.

“It’s fantastically important that engineers understand the language of business ,” says Richard Jeffers, Managing Director of RS Industria at RS Group.

“At RS, my finance colleagues do financial modelling for me, but I have to be able to look at that financial modelling and understand it so that I can have a coherent conversation about it.”

For further advice to enhance your organisation’s planning, read the full article on the Connected Thinking website.