Maintenance Engineer Interview Questions And Answers

You should research a career path that would flow from the position for which you are interviewing and ensure that you emphasise the intention to master the demands of that position first.

Your answer should include: the way you listened to what the client had to say, confirmed an understanding of their concerns and subsequently took responsibility to resolve the situation by offering a solution, without going into too much detail about the specific complaint.

☛ 1) Starvation. Separating or removing the burning material from the neighbour hood of the fire.
☛ 2) Blanketing. Preventing the air flow to the fire.
☛ 3) Cooling. Lowering the heat created by burning materials.

The role of maintenance in maintaining asset value over time is getting more visible at the business level with the increase in its acquisition and maintenance costs.

various manufacturing systems are introduced along with their distinctive features that influence maintenance strategies and practices.

The main decisive factor for maximizing manufacturing asset value in terms productivity, reliability, cost, etc. is maintenance management, the body of the organization that is in charge of planning, implementing, controlling, and improving maintenance activities. Maintenance management is often considered as a centralized functional unit within the overall organizational structure in parallel with other functional units such as, production, Decentralized maintenance units is another common structure adopted by large organizations with multiple production units. The decision of adopting centralized or decentralized management structure is usually mad at the high management level taking into consideration, the size of the organization, the complexity of its operations, and the organization culture.

Because it is more legible than other styles.

The organizing responsibility of maintenance management includes:

☛ Job design
☛ Time standards
☛ Project management.

Job design involves defining for each major maintenance job, the work content, the method of maintenance the required skills and the needed tools.

Time standards are determined for major components of major maintenance jobs following the scientific approach. This helps in controlling maintenance tasks and efficient utilization of resources. It is also useful for planning and scheduling maintenance activities and forecasting workload.

Project management is used for optimizing and controlling major complex time consuming maintenance operations, such as shutdown maintenance projects for large plants. Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review (PERT) are common project management tools.

Some of the key objectives of TPM are:

☛ Focus and improve people management to minimize the targeted losses.
☛ Develop the policy, strategy and early management activities to ensure easy maintenance of the equipment.
☛ Develop the autonomous maintenance system to empower the production operators to take care of the conditions and effectiveness of the equipment.
☛ Develop a planned maintenance of the machine and equipment.
☛ Provide training and education to the operators and maintenance personnel to upgrade their equipment-related knowledge and skills.
☛ Establish safety practices and also prevent adverse environmental effects.
☛ Reduce the wastage of organizational resources.

The primary principles upon which RCM is based are the following:

☛ Function oriented. It seeks to preserve system or equipment function.
☛ Device group focused. It is concerned with maintaining the overall functionality of a group of devices rather than an individual device.
☛ Reliability centred. It uses failure statistics in an actuarial manner to look at the relationship between operating age and the failures. RCM is not overly concerned with simple failure rate; it seeks to know the probability of failure at specific ages.
☛ Acknowledges design limitations. Its objective is to maintain the inherent reliability of the equipment design, recognizing that changes in reliability are the province of design rather than maintenance. Maintenance can only achieve and maintain the level provided for by design.
☛ Driven by safety and economics. Safety must be ensured at any cost; thereafter, cost-effectiveness becomes the criterion.
☛ Defines failure as any unsatisfactory condition. Therefore, failure may be either a loss of function (operation ceases) or a loss of acceptable quality (operation continues).
☛ Uses a logic tree to screen maintenance tasks. This provides a consistent approach to the maintenance of all kinds of equipment.
☛ Tasks must be applicable. The tasks must address the failure mode and consider the failure mode characteristics.
☛ Tasks must be effective. The tasks must reduce the probability of failure and be cost effective.
☛ Acknowledges two types of Maintenance tasks and Run-to-failure. The tasks are Interval (Time- or Cycle-)-Based and Condition-Based. In RCM, Run-to-Failure is a conscious decision and is acceptable for some equipment.
☛ A living system. It gathers data from the results achieved and feeds this data back to improve future maintenance. This feedback is an important part of the Proactive Maintenance element of the RCM program.

It is a plane curve formed by a point moving so that the sum of its distances from two fixed points (foci) is constant and equal to major axis.

Be relaxed and explain that you are looking for a company and role with the right fit, and that you are quite choosy when it comes to finding the ‘right job’. You may then need to answer what you believe the ‘right job’ entails.

Detail any particular skills that you developed whilst at university and describe how you obtained them. Finish up talking about your willingness to learn.

(a) To measure distance accurately.
(b) For making drawing to scale either in full size, reduced size or enlarged size.

The most flexible and responsive to changes manufacturing system is the flexible manufacturing system (FMS). It absorbs sudden large scale changes in production volume, capacity and capability. FMS produces a product just like intermittent manufacturing and is continuous like continuous manufacturing.

Maintenance philosophy is the step of designing on the general maintenance concept selected from known best practices as the maintenance philosophy for the organization. Total productive maintenance and reliability based maintenance concepts are two widely spread concepts. The selected concept is supported with right combinations of maintenance strategies such as preventive maintenance, condition based maintenance, and shutdown maintenance.

ds=dQ/TEntropy is inversely proportional to the temperature so.as temp. increases, entropy decreases.

Dimension lines are the thin lines used to indicate extents and direction of dimension. These are terminated with arrowheads.
Extension lines are also thin lines and it used to indicate the termination of a dimension.
Leaders are used to direct notes or identification symbols to feature on the drawing.

Software engineering is an engineering branch associated with software system development.

Choose three or four characteristics and expand on why you think they’re important. You could also describe how a previous manager of yours displayed these qualities to good effect and how you learned from that example.

This is freehand expression of the graphic language.

Lettering is the presentation of information data on a drawing.

Controlling activities of maintenance management include the following:

☛ Work Control
☛ Inventory Control
☛ Cost Control
☛ Quality Control.

Work control is done using work order system in an integrated data base system for controlling reporting and analyzing. Intelligent maintenance systems are developed and integrated with ERP systems are commonly used and proven to be efficient and effective.

Inventory control is an important element of maintenance management that ensures the availability of spare parts and tools in the right quantity at the right time. Ordering and re-ordering quantities taking into consideration costs and lead times are built into automated information systems to assist management in this task by raising red flags at reorder points.

Cost control involves tracing all cost components of maintenance activities that include direct maintenance costs, lost production, equipment degradation, backups, and over maintenance costs.

Quality control of maintenance work involves assuring that the maintenance work is following standards and producing the expected results. Control is done by the supervision and testing final outcomes following a predetermined control procedure.

Draw upon a specific example – one that showcases your strengths as an engineer, such as the ability to think on your feet.

☛ How do you go about allocating work to subordinates?
☛ How do you ensure others have understood your instructions?
☛ Imagine a manager asks you whether it’s better to replace or repair a certain machine. How would you determine the answer?
☛ If there was a very important repair to be done that might exceed the allocated budget, what would you do?
☛ Imagine you need to create a training plan for new employees. What should they be trained in?
☛ If a contractor you hired had an accident while working, what would you do?
☛ What do you enjoy most in this job?
☛ What kind of maintenance duties did you undertake in your previous position?
☛ What does ISO 14001 refer to?
☛ What’s your experience with HVAC systems?
☛ How familiar are you with Preventive Maintenance Regulations?
☛ What’s your experience with PLC?
☛ Have you done electrical system repairs in the past?
☛ Tell me about a time you successfully coached a maintenance technician
☛ Describe a time you failed to provide good leadership. Why did that happen and what did you learn from the experience?
☛ Recall a time when you had to solve a problem without input from a manager. How did you handle it and what happened in the end?
☛ Give an example of a time you managed to identify and fix a problem before it became urgent
☛ Tell me about a time you hired personnel (e.g. maintenance technicians). How did you go about it and what qualities did you look for?

☛ Keep shop floor clean, free from oil and other slippery materials.
☛ Wear proper dress and avoid loose clothing and loose hair.
☛ Wear shoes and avoid chapels.
☛ Avoid playing, loose talk and funning inside the shop floor.
☛ Keep good housekeeping and put all unnecessary items and rejected items in scrap box.
☛ Learn everything about the machine before starting and clear all the doubts.
☛ Keep a safe distance from rotating and sliding parts.
☛ Never store inflammable materials inside or around the shop.
☛ Never play with electricity, fire, parts with sharp edge etc.
☛ Keep fire buckets and extinguishers ready for use.