What Is Maintenance Engineering?

Maintenance engineering is a profession that involves planning and implementing routine equipment and machinery maintenance using engineering theories and practices. To achieve and maintain the highest levels of reliability and profit, this must be done in conjunction with optimizing operating procedures and budgets. Over the last few decades, the influx of high-tech machinery, multiple infrastructures and systems, and complex computerized manufacturing and production systems has elevated these jobs to new levels of responsibility and qualification requirements. Maintenance engineers are frequently required to have a broad understanding of a variety of equipment and machinery.

A person working in this field needs to be well-versed in basic equipment operation, logistics, probability, and statistics, or have prior experience in these areas. Experience with the operation and maintenance of machinery that is specific to a company’s industry is frequently required. Excellent interpersonal communication and participatory management skills are also desirable because the position typically requires oral and written communications with various levels of personnel.

Routine and preventive maintenance programs must be planned and implemented maintenance engineers. Furthermore, equipment must be monitored on a regular basis to visually detect faults and impending equipment or production failures before they occur. These jobs may also entail watching and supervising repairs and maintenance done outside vendors and contractors.

Good maintenance is required in a production or manufacturing environment to ensure that daily plant operations run smoothly and safely. Maintenance engineers not only keep an eye on existing systems and equipment, but they also make recommendations for improvements and assist in determining when systems are outdated and need to be replaced. Exchange of ideas and information with other maintenance engineers, production managers, and manufacturing systems engineers is common in this position.

Engineers in maintenance engineering must not only monitor large production machine operations and heavy-duty equipment, but they must also be familiar with computer operations. Maintenance engineers may be responsible for a variety of tasks, including PCs, routers, servers, and software, as well as more complex issues such as local and off-site networks, configuration systems, end-user support, and scheduled upgrades. Technical personnel supervision may also be required.

Any manufacturing or processing operation, regardless of size, requires good maintenance engineering. The maintenance engineer is in charge of ensuring the plant’s daily operations run smoothly as well as identifying and resolving any operational issues. A quality maintenance department that can be relied on to discover systematic flaws and recommend solid, practical solutions could be critical to a company’s success.

Positions in this field frequently necessitate a bachelor’s degree in a related field. Although most schools do not offer maintenance engineering degrees, graduates with degrees in mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, or related fields are preferred.