98% available can still be failing every fortnight. Availability is not reliability.
Two days on the fundamentals: what the metrics actually say, which assets deserve the effort, how failures behave, and which maintenance strategy answers each. For engineers and maintainers new to reliability, and for practitioners who never got the structured version.
Four things you can do on the Monday
Most sites argue about reliability using numbers nobody defined and priorities nobody ranked. Two days that give the whole team the same fundamentals, so the arguments end and the decisions start.
Read the metrics honestly
MTBF, MTTR and availability, what each one actually measures, and the traps hiding in them. Starting with why a high availability number can conceal a failing asset.
Rank assets by criticality
A structured criticality assessment, so reliability effort follows consequence instead of following whoever shouted last.
Recognise failure behaviour
The failure patterns that show up in real equipment, and why age tells you far less about most failures than the maintenance plan assumes.
Match the strategy to the failure
Preventive, predictive and corrective maintenance each answer a different failure behaviour. Learn which one each situation deserves, and when run-to-failure is the honest call.
Two days, seven sessions
Day one builds the language: metrics, criticality, what reliability actually measures. Day two is about failures and what to do about them.
- 1Introduction to reliability. What reliability engineering is for, and where it pays on an operating site.
- 2Reliability fundamentals. The core concepts, defined precisely enough to argue with.
- 3Reliability metrics. MTBF, MTTR, availability. What each measures, and what each hides.
- 4Asset criticality. Ranking assets by consequence, so effort lands where failure costs most.
- 5Understanding failure modes. The types of failure and the patterns real equipment follows.
- 6Maintenance strategies and tactics. Preventive, predictive and corrective, and which failure behaviour each one answers.
- 7Bringing it all together. Metrics, criticality, failure behaviour and strategy as one working system, plus where to go deeper.
Bring your site’s numbers
The metrics session lands hardest on your own figures. Bring the availability, MTBF and downtime numbers your site reports today, and test what they are really telling you.
Who this is for
Engineers and technicians new to reliability
Anyone involved in the design, installation, operation or maintenance of equipment who wants the discipline behind the buzzwords, including people starting a reliability career.
Maintenance personnel and supervisors
The people closest to the failures. The fundamentals turn years of hands-on experience into arguments that hold up in a planning meeting.
Managers who own the outcome
If you are accountable for uptime, the fundamentals are what let you interrogate the numbers you are handed instead of accepting them.
What you need before you start
Nothing. This is the entry point to the whole training pathway, and no prior reliability training is assumed. Working knowledge of the equipment you run is worth more here than any qualification.
The entry point to every course that follows
Every deeper course assumes the language this one builds. Teams usually start here, then pick the analysis their site needs first.
Fundamentals of Reliability Engineering
2 days. Metrics, criticality, failure behaviour and strategy.
FMECA Foundations or Weibull Analysis
2 days each. Failure modes and criticality, or life data analysis. Choose by the problem your site argues about most.
RCM Foundations and Maintenance Plan Optimisation
3 days each. Turn the analysis into a maintenance program you can defend.
Learn the method. Then put AI to work on it.
Understand the analysis first, leave with the templates, then use AI to do in hours what used to take days. The course closes with a working session on exactly that, inside your site’s IT and confidentiality rules.
What AI accelerates
Summarising years of work-order history, turning free-text records into usable failure data, and drafting the criticality inputs that used to take a week of spreadsheet work.
What stays with the engineer
Which asset matters most, which failure pattern you are looking at, and which strategy answers it. AI prepares the ground. The fundamentals are how you judge what it hands you.
What you leave with
A prompting guide written for reliability work, a starter prompt library for the fundamentals, and a setup checklist for using AI within site IT and data rules.
We run our own operation this way. The AI workflows taught here are the ones we use to deliver client work, from OEM manual extraction to failure history analysis.
Three ways to take it. One seat or the whole crew.
Every course runs in all three formats. On site is priced as an engagement rather than per head, so crew size is your call. Public and online cohorts confirm once a small minimum books, and every booking is protected: if a date does not confirm, you choose the next cohort, the online session, or a full refund.
Public classroom
Runs in our training room in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. Book one seat or several and work alongside engineers from other operations. Dates confirm once the cohort reaches its minimum.
Live online
Same instructor, same exercises, delivered live rather than recorded. Confirms on a smaller cohort than the classroom, and it is the route in from anywhere outside the Sunshine Coast.
On site at your operation
We come to you and the analysis runs on your equipment. Priced as an engagement, not per head.
Taught by the engineers who do this work on sites
Not career trainers. The person at the front of the room applies these fundamentals on operating mines and plants every week, and brings that work into the course.
Delivered by the engineering bench, not a training department
Courses are taught by HolisticAM reliability engineers who deliver this same work for clients between courses. Whoever stands at the front ran this analysis on an operating site recently, so the examples are current and the answers are practical.
Proven in delivery
Training is a delivery arm of the consultancy. The most recent full program trained 26 engineers and maintainers at a major Pacific gold operation, delivered live online, with certificates of completion issued.
It gets used on the Monday
Within days of that delivery, attendees were sending their own analyses of live plant equipment back to the trainer for review. That is the outcome every course here is built for.
The session was informative, well-structured and incredibly helpful. The knowledge gained will certainly enhance my RCA facilitation skills at work.
This course was terrific and beneficial. It opened my mind to expand and think differently. I enjoyed every moment.
Across 27 external participant surveys from our Apollo RCA courses, self-rated knowledge moved from 3 to 8 out of 10.
Before you book
Do I need an engineering degree?
No. The course is built for engineers, technicians, maintenance personnel and supervisors alike. Working knowledge of the equipment you run is worth more here than any qualification, and no prior reliability training is assumed.
I have twenty years of maintenance experience. Is this too basic for me?
Experienced maintainers usually get the most out of it, because the course gives structure to what they already know from the tools. The metrics discipline, the criticality method and the failure pattern evidence are the pieces most practitioners never got formally, and they are what turn experience into arguments that win in a planning meeting.
Do we need to buy software?
No. This is a concepts and methods course. Everything in it works with the CMMS and spreadsheets your site already runs, and nothing you learn stops working when a licence lapses.
Can AI just handle reliability for us?
AI is genuinely good at the preparation: summarising history, cleaning data, drafting analyses. What it cannot do is own the decision, and without the fundamentals you cannot tell a sound draft from a fluent one. The course teaches the fundamentals precisely so your team can put AI to work and judge what it produces. That is why the AI session closes the course instead of replacing it.
Can I do it online?
Yes. Every course runs live online as well as in the classroom and on site. Online is delivered live with an instructor, not recorded, and you work the same exercises. If you are one engineer rather than a team, this is usually the fastest way in.
Where do public courses run?
In our training room in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. If travel does not make sense from where you are, the live online cohort is the same course with the same instructor, and on site delivery brings it to your operation.
Which course should we do after this one?
It depends on what your site argues about most. Recurring failures nobody can explain point to Weibull Analysis. A maintenance plan nobody trusts points to FMECA Foundations and then RCM. Tell us the problem at booking and we will map the pathway with you.
Give the whole team the same fundamentals, and the arguments turn into decisions.
Two days on metrics, criticality, failure behaviour and strategy. The entry point to every course that follows.