Ask three people on a mine site what the reliability engineering consultant is here to do and you will get three answers: run a workshop, write a report, and “something to do with the maintenance strategy”. The confusion is fair. Reliability engineering consulting is bought by sites that do not yet have the capability in-house, which means the people buying it have rarely watched it done well.
HolisticAM (Holistic Asset Management) is an Australian reliability engineering and asset management consultancy whose engineers came up inside operations at companies including Rio Tinto, BHP, Alcoa and MMG, and now deliver reliability engineering on mine sites and processing plants as consultants. This guide explains what the work actually is: what a consultant does in an engagement, stage by stage, what should land in your systems when they leave, and how to tell delivered value from a well-formatted report.
The short answer: A reliability engineering consultant analyses how your equipment fails and builds the maintenance strategy that addresses it, then packages that strategy so your team can run it. The core work is analysis and facilitation: asset criticality, FMECA and RCM studies run with your operators and maintainers, failure data analysis, and maintenance plans built to load into your CMMS. The consultant’s product is not the analysis itself; it is a maintenance program your site executes after they leave.
In This Guide
- The Work Itself: Five Kinds of Work
- A Typical Engagement, Start to Finish
- What a Consultant Brings That the Site Cannot Easily Grow
- Consultant or Site Reliability Engineer
- What Good Looks Like: Judging the Work
- Reliability Engineering Consulting with HolisticAM
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Further Reading
The work itself: what fills a consultant’s weeks on site
An engagement is mostly made of five kinds of work. The mix shifts with the scope, but a site watching its consultant should see all five.
Ranking what matters (asset criticality). Before any deep analysis, the consultant ranks the asset base by consequence of failure, so the expensive analytical effort lands on the assets that can hurt the business. Across a full mine-site asset register, this step is what separates a targeted program from a boiled ocean.
Facilitating the analysis (FMECA and RCM). The technical heart of the job. The consultant runs structured FMECA and RCM studies with a cross-functional team of your operators, maintainers and engineers, working failure mode by failure mode: what can fail, what it costs when it does, and what task (if any) is worth doing about it. The facilitation matters as much as the method. Your trades hold failure knowledge that exists in no document, and extracting it is a skill.
Reading the data (life data and loss analysis). Where failure history exists, the consultant analyses it: Weibull analysis to tell wear-out from random failure, downtime and loss accounting to point effort at the biggest losses, and interval calculations that replace OEM defaults with evidence from your own operating context.
Building the program (strategy into the CMMS). Analysis that never reaches the CMMS changes nothing. The consultant turns the study outputs into maintenance plans, task lists, intervals, and spares recommendations, structured for your CMMS so the strategy becomes scheduled work rather than a binder. On one new iron-ore plant, that meant 353 planned routine tasks across 23 asset lines, built before first ore so the operations team ran to strategy from day one.
Transferring the capability. The engagement ends; the failure modes do not. Good consultants coach the site team through the method as they go, so reviews and future analyses can be run in-house. If every future strategy decision requires calling the consultant back, the engagement built dependency, not capability.
A typical engagement, start to finish
Scopes vary from a focused single-system study to a full site program, but the spine is consistent:
- Diagnose. Read the failure history, the maintenance program, and the loss data. Establish where the site actually bleeds, which is regularly not where the site believes it bleeds.
- Agree the target. Scope the assets, the analyses, and the deliverables against criticality. A defensible scope names what is excluded and why.
- Analyse. Run the studies: criticality, FMECA or RCM to the depth each asset earns, data analysis where history supports it. On site, with your people in the room, not from a hotel desk.
- Build. Convert analysis into CMMS-ready maintenance plans, condition monitoring routes, and spares holdings, with the reasoning documented against each task.
- Implement and hand over. Load, verify, and walk the program into service with the planners and supervisors who will run it, then hand over the evidence base so the site owns its strategy outright.
Two things distinguish project engagements from operating-site engagements. On capital projects, the consultant works ahead of the asset: building readiness before commissioning, as part of operational readiness. On operating sites, the work starts from history: the failures already hurting, the PM program already generating work. The methods overlap heavily; the starting evidence differs.
What a consultant brings that the site cannot easily grow
There are honest structural reasons sites buy this capability rather than build it, and they go beyond headcount:
- Pattern library. A consultant who has analysed crushers, mills and conveyors across many sites has seen your failure modes before, and knows which strategies survived contact with operations. A site team sees one site’s history.
- Facilitation neutrality. FMECA and RCM workshops surface disagreements between operations, maintenance and engineering. An outside facilitator can push through them without owing anyone next week’s favour.
- Protected focus. The analysis actually finishes. The site’s own engineers get pulled into every breakdown; a consultant’s scope is contractually fenced against firefighting.
- Method discipline. Standards-based analysis (SAE JA1011 for RCM, IEC 60812 for FMECA, IEC 61649 for Weibull) that holds up under audit, insurance and capital scrutiny.
The converse is also true and worth stating plainly: a consultant is not there at 6am when the shift supervisor makes the call that quietly kills reliability, and cannot be. Continuous, embedded reliability presence is a different service model. If the gap is ongoing capability rather than a defined body of analysis, the comparison you want is in-house engineer vs consultant vs managed service, or our guide to what a managed reliability service is.
Consultant or site reliability engineer: different questions
The consultant and the employed site reliability engineer share a toolkit and split the territory. (For the employed role in full, including salary and career path, see what a reliability engineer does.)
| Site reliability engineer | Reliability engineering consultant | |
|---|---|---|
| Time horizon | Continuous, lives with the asset base | Defined engagement with an end date |
| Best at | Daily defect elimination, chasing strategy compliance, owning the long game | Concentrated analysis, program builds, resets, independent review |
| Evidence base | Deep on this site | Broad across many sites |
| Fails when | Dragged into firefighting until analysis never happens | Scope written as a report instead of an implemented program |
Most mature sites end up with both at different times: consultants for the concentrated builds and resets, a site engineer (or managed service) to run and defend the strategy between them.
What good looks like: judging the work
Reliability consulting has a deserved reputation problem: studies that end as shelf documents. Hold any consultant, ours included, to these tests:
- The analysis was done with your people, not to them. If your operators and trades were not in the room, the failure modes are incomplete and the site will not own the outputs.
- Every recommended task traces to a failure mode. “Increase PM frequency” with no failure mode behind it is opinion wearing a high-vis vest.
- The deliverable loads into your CMMS. Strategy expressed as task lists, intervals and plans, not chapters.
- The reasoning is handed over. You get the analysis files and the basis for every decision, so the program can be defended and updated without calling anyone.
- Something is measurably different afterwards. Fewer repeat failures on the analysed systems, planned work displacing reactive work, intervals with evidence behind them.
“The test I give clients is one question: six months after the consultant leaves, is your maintenance program different, and can your own people explain why? If the answer is a report on a shared drive, the engagement failed, whoever wrote it,” said Dave Alexander, Managing Director, HolisticAM.
The cheapest way to find out if you need one
A Reliability Assessment reads your maintenance and failure data, names the failure modes driving your losses, and hands you a costed next step you own. Fixed scope, fixed fee, agreed before we start.
Reliability engineering consulting with HolisticAM
HolisticAM delivers reliability engineering consulting across mining, manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities in Australia, from single-asset studies to full-site programs and capital project readiness. Our engineers average more than 20 years of on-site reliability and maintenance experience, and every engagement is built to end with an implemented program your team owns.
See the full scope of our reliability engineering consulting services, or talk to our team about the problem you are trying to solve.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a reliability engineering consulting engagement last?
It depends on scope. A focused study on a single critical asset system can take two to four weeks, including workshops and CMMS-ready outputs. A site-wide maintenance strategy program across multiple asset classes typically runs three to six months when conducted properly with a cross-functional team. Capital project readiness engagements track the project schedule, often engaging in stages from design through to handover.
What information does a reliability engineering consultant need before starting on site?
The core inputs are an asset register, maintenance and failure history from the CMMS, existing maintenance plans and strategies, and access to the operators, maintainers and engineers who know the equipment. Clean data helps but is not a prerequisite; part of the early work is establishing what the records can and cannot support.
What is the difference between a reliability engineering consultant and a maintenance consultant?
A maintenance consultant typically works on the execution system: planning and scheduling, backlog, shutdown management, and CMMS workflows. A reliability engineering consultant works on the strategy beneath it: which failure modes matter, which tasks are worth doing at which intervals, and whether the program prevents failure at all. The disciplines connect, and mature engagements coordinate both, but they answer different questions.
Do reliability engineering consultants only work on new projects?
No. Operating sites are a major source of the work: underperforming PM programs, repeat failures, or a reliability improvement push. The rest is capital projects, where the consultant builds maintenance readiness before commissioning as part of operational readiness. The methods are shared; the starting evidence differs.
How do you measure the results of a reliability engineering consulting engagement?
Against the baseline the engagement started from: repeat failure counts on the analysed systems, the ratio of planned to reactive work, strategy coverage of critical assets, and whether the recommended program is actually loaded and being executed in the CMMS. A credible consultant agrees the measures and the baseline before the work starts, not after.