Position: Senior Consultant (Technical)

Experience: 5 - 7 years

Core Focus: Maintenance Operations, Equipment Reliability, Breakdown Elimination, MTBF - MTTR Improvement, Preventive & Predictive Maintenance, Shop-Floor Transformation

Location: Odisha

Job Summary:

This role is for a maintenance and reliability professional who has personally managed maintenance activities and solved equipment reliability problems on the shop floor, preferably in steel, metals or other asset-intensive industries like cement or chemicals.

The consultant will diagnose equipment reliability losses, recurring breakdowns and maintenance-system gaps and work with plant teams to implement practical interventions that improve equipment availability, MTBF and MTTR.

The expectation is not to provide only recommendations - the individual must be comfortable going onto the shop floor, analysing breakdown and maintenance data, identifying root causes and driving measurable improvement.

This role complements the capability of the existing management consulting team on ground by working directly with the plant maintenance and operations teams in challenging, coaching and hands-on resolving issues leading to reliability and OEE losses.

The role will focus on equipment criticality, breakdown elimination, preventive and predictive maintenance, maintenance planning and scheduling, critical spares and other interventions required to improve asset availability and reduce unplanned downtime.

Candidates whose experience is limited to maintenance coordination, vendor management or preparing maintenance MIS without direct equipment problem-solving and reliability improvement should not be prioritised.

Potential opportunity for client absorption: Subject to the client's requirements and acceptance, the selected candidate may have an opportunity to transition to the client's payroll after 1 - 2 years of successful programme delivery and demonstrated performance.

Any such transition shall be entirely at the discretion of the client and the candidate and shall not constitute a commitment, guarantee, or binding obligation on the part of the consulting company.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Shop-Floor Diagnostics:

- Conduct detailed shop-floor diagnostics across critical equipment and maintenance processes.

- Conduct equipment criticality assessment based on operational, safety, quality and production impact.

- Analyse historical breakdown, downtime and equipment failure data.

- Identify chronic losses, recurring failures and critical reliability gaps.

- Observe maintenance practices, equipment condition and execution discipline on the shop floor.

- Establish reliability baselines covering breakdowns, downtime, MTBF, MTTR and equipment availability.

2. Reliability & Breakdown Elimination:

- Lead structured analysis of recurring equipment breakdowns and reliability losses.

- Conduct root-cause analysis for critical and chronic failures.

- Develop and implement Focused Improvement Projects (FIPs) for breakdown elimination.

- Identify interventions to improve MTBF and reduce MTTR.

- Track reliability improvements against baseline and target.

- Link equipment reliability losses to OEE and production impact.

- Support development of failure-mode-based interventions for critical assets.

3. Maintenance Excellence:

- Review existing preventive maintenance, standards and compliance.

- Strengthen preventive and predictive maintenance systems for critical equipment.

- Improve maintenance planning, scheduling and execution discipline.

- Analyse planned versus unplanned maintenance and identify opportunities for improvement.

- Strengthen maintenance backlog management and prioritisation.

- Establish maintenance-performance reviews and KPI ownership.

- Identify opportunities for condition-based and predictive maintenance.

4. Critical Spares Management:

- Assess critical spare requirements for key equipment.

- Conduct criticality-based review of spare parts.

- Identify equipment downtime attributable to spares unavailability.

- Develop recommendations for critical-spares stocking and availability.

- Support improvement of spare planning and replenishment practices.

- Link critical-spares strategy with equipment criticality and business impact.

5. Daily Management & Governance:

- Support implementation of Daily Management Team (DMT) routines for maintenance and reliability.

- Define and track reliability and maintenance KPIs including MTBF, MTTR, breakdown frequency, downtime, PM compliance and equipment availability.

- Establish KPI ownership at maintenance engineer, supervisor, departmental and plant levels.

- Drive action tracking, escalation and closure of reliability actions.

- Coach plant teams in structured maintenance and reliability performance management.

- Integrate maintenance and reliability reviews with Production, OEE and Quality reviews.

6. Problem Solving:

- Lead structured root-cause analysis for recurring equipment failures.

- Apply Pareto, 5-Why, Fishbone and other structured problem-solving tools.

- Use historical equipment and maintenance data to validate root causes.

- Develop and implement corrective and preventive actions.

- Verify effectiveness and sustainability of implemented countermeasures.

- Capture and standardise lessons from recurring equipment failures.

7. Capability Building:

- Coach maintenance engineers, supervisors and technicians in reliability and problem-solving tools.

- Build internal reliability champions within the plant.

- Develop standard work, maintenance routines and SOPs for critical processes.

- Provide on-the-job coaching during breakdown analysis and FIP execution.

- Support transfer of reliability methodologies and practices to client teams.

Required Qualifications & Technical Skills:

Education:

- B.E./B.Tech in Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation or related Engineering discipline preferred.

- MBA / PGDM in Manufacturing Operations or related discipline preferred.

Experience:

- 5 - 7 years of hands-on maintenance / reliability experience.

- Strong preference for candidates who have worked in steel / metals / heavy engineering or other heavy-asset manufacturing environments.

- Should have experience handling critical plant equipment and solving equipment-related problems on the shop floor.

- Must have experience beyond routine maintenance execution, with demonstrated contribution to reliability, breakdown reduction or maintenance improvement.

- Consulting / operational transformation experience would be an added advantage.

Technical Skills:

- Equipment reliability analysis

- Breakdown and downtime analysis

- MTBF - MTTR improvement

- Equipment criticality assessment

- Preventive maintenance

- Predictive / condition-based maintenance

- Maintenance planning and scheduling

- Root-cause analysis

- TPM

- Critical spares management

- Maintenance KPI management

- Daily Management Systems

- Advanced Excel

- Power BI preferred

- CMMS / ERP exposure preferred

Certifications:

- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt / Black Belt strongly preferred.

- CMRP / maintenance and reliability certification advantageous.

- TPM certification / training advantageous.