Reliability and Maintenance Manager

Strategic Implementation

• Translate strategy into operational initiatives with measurable business outcomes and targets.
• Facilitate the development of best practice in operations and service excellence.

• Own the reliability strategy for the refinery, defining Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) scope and system selection for Preventative Maintenance (PM) analysis.

• Accountable for the RCM study — conduct Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), determine equipment criticality and select PM and Predictive Maintenance (PdM) task strategies.

Operational Effectiveness

• Establish and manage a comprehensive Reliability Programme, including Root Cause Analysis (RCA), FMEA and RCM.
• Implement predictive and condition-based monitoring technologies to identify equipment issues before failures occur.

• Manage preventive and corrective maintenance for all refinery assets, ensuring minimal disruption to operations.

• Lead maintenance planning and scheduling to optimise resource utilisation, spare-parts management and cost control.

• Manage turnaround and shutdown planning and execution, ensuring safe and efficient delivery within budget and schedule.

• Add day-to-day delivery, running processes, monitoring performance, managing exceptions.

• Drive standardisation of maintenance procedures and ensure compliance with company and industry standards.

• Promote maintenance excellence through KPI monitoring, benchmarking and performance analysis.

• Own on-stream Turnaround delivery, including technical approval to proceed, equipment handover and reinstatement, and post-TA analysis with capture of lessons learned.

• Drive maintenance performance through monthly stewardship of Rolling Work Programme (RWP) metrics and structured resolution of chronic bad actors.

• Direct warehouse and maintenance inventory management — ensuring spare parts, materials and critical stock are available to support maintenance execution and turnaround delivery.

Financial Management

• Manage budgets and monitor expenses ensuring expenditure is within approved budgets.

• Manage all direct maintenance and maintenance-overhead costs for the refinery, ensuring expenditure is within approved budgets.

• Monitor and report on refinery maintenance costs (direct and overhead), and prepare annual maintenance cost forecasts for the business plan cycle.

• Secure technical and budget approval for the Turnaround, and ensure maintenance inventory and spares holding are optimised against working-capital and carrying costs.

People Management

• Provide direction and define objectives to be achieved in area of responsibility.

• Manage performance of direct reports ensuring agreement of annual goals and measuring performance against agreed goals and addressing non-performance issues.

• Deploy people management processes effectively, in line with Company policies, procedures and prevailing improvement initiatives.

• Drive operational excellence through area of supervision.

• Oversee resource deployment to ensure adequate cover and resilience in the team.

• Promote, support, and encourage team members to live the Company values.

• Drive a culture of high performance and accountability and encourage team members to live the Company values.

• Build reliability and maintenance capability across the team — superintendents, leads and engineers — through coaching, technical development and succession planning.

Safety, Health, Environment and Quality

• Ensure compliance with all Safety, Health, Environmental and all other applicable regulatory statutes, and all other safety and quality processes for the area of responsibility/work.

• Steward OMS within Astron Energy to ensure continuous improvement.

• Collaborate with SHEQ teams to maintain compliance with environmental and safety standards.

• Ensure compliance with statutory inspection, certification and pressure-equipment regulations for maintainable assets.

• Accountable for contractor Occupational Health (OH) compliance across reliability and maintenance activities.

Stakeholder Relationship Management

• Identify, build and nurture trust and collaborative relationships with internal and external stakeholders.

• Accountable for reliability input to capital planning — hand over to operations, commission and conduct pre-start reviews for new assets.

• Interface with the Technical Manager on fixed-equipment integrity, RBI/IMP outcomes and catalyst strategy that inform maintenance planning.

• Manage technical service providers and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) relationships to sustain reliability performance.

• Steward OMS within Astron Energy to ensure continuous improvement.

Professional Qualification and Certifications:

• BEng or BSc in Mechanical Engineering (minimum); B-Tech Mechanical with additional experience considered.
• Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) registration advantageous; Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) or equivalent preferred.

Work Experience:

• 15+ years' experience in a manufacturing or refinery environment, the majority in maintenance, plus operational and technical experience.

• Proven experience in maintenance planning, reliability programmes and asset integrity management.

• Demonstrated experience leading shutdowns, turnarounds and major maintenance projects.

• Experience managing a multi-disciplinary team in a refinery or heavy industrial environment.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Strong understanding of rotating and static equipment, mechanical integrity and condition monitoring.
• Deep knowledge of maintenance methodologies — RCM, FMEA, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and bad-actor elimination.

• Reliability systems and tools — Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS/SAP PM), predictive analytics and condition-monitoring technologies.

• Financial and budgeting acumen for maintenance planning and cost control.

• Strong leadership, coaching and team-development capability.

• High commitment to safety, process integrity and quality; knowledge of safety and environmental regulations.

• Strong communication, stakeholder-engagement and change-management skills.

Application deadline: