Maintenance engineers may face challenges old and new, but there are innovative solutions available to support them
Dr Moray Kidd was the keynote speaker at RS Connect in Telford 2022. Dr Kidd started his career as a maintenance engineer, Dr Kidd then moved into the academic sphere. He has now spent over a decade building on his hands-on experience by undertaking his own research and supervising PhD students – creating a dialogue between theory and practice in the process.
This commitment to drawing research and industry together was readily apparent in Dr Kidd’s discussion of plant reliability and the challenges facing the maintenance engineering sector. He shared insights with those watching in person and online about the fundamental flaws that characterise benchmarks of maintenance such as the mean time to failure as well as the difficulties of creating standards for digital data.
While some of the topics covered by Dr Kidd are relatively new issues, others are perennial challenges – whether it’s how to work better together across different teams or how to deal with poor management. There were chuckles of recognition from the audience with the latter.
Crucially, though, Dr Kidd also shared solutions, ranging from resources and opportunities that are available to broader reflections on the current state of maintenance engineering and areas for development.
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