Practitioner-authored perspectives on reliability engineering, maintenance strategy, asset management, and professional development — written for and by Africa’s industrial professionals.
What no study guide tells you about preparing for — and passing — the Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional examination, from a practitioner who did it in Nigeria.
Jonathan David · Reliability Strategy
Jonathan David · Asset Management
Jonathan David · Reliability Engineering
Jonathan David · Professional Journey
I am frequently asked how to prepare for the Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) examination. This article distils the insights I believe matter most for any practitioner approaching this credential — not as a theoretical exercise, but as someone who sat for it in Nigeria and has since helped many others do the same.
Let me first be clear about what the CMRP is. It is not a tick-box credential, nor is it comparable to the numerous certifications circulated today with limited practical relevance. The CMRP is ANSI-approved, tests active working knowledge across the five pillars of maintenance and reliability, and is internationally recognised as a marker of genuine professional competence. If you are pursuing it, that instinct is correct.
1. Acquire at least one recommended text for each pillar. The exam is built around the SMRP Body of Knowledge. For each pillar, there are recommended references — among them, Ramesh Gulati’s Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices has been particularly useful for candidates I have mentored. Read for understanding, not memorisation.
2. Use the SMRP study resources actively. SMRP provides practice questions and a candidate handbook. These are not supplementary — they are essential. Understanding how the questions are framed will save you significant time during the examination itself.
3. Consider a structured preparatory programme. While no single course can fully substitute for experience, a well-run preparatory masterclass can align your knowledge with best-in-class standards and surface gaps you did not know existed. The Maintenance Institute Africa offers one such programme — but regardless of provider, the quality of facilitation matters more than the brand.
4. Bring your experience into the room. The CMRP tests applied knowledge. Candidates with hands-on maintenance and reliability experience have a genuine advantage — provided they approach their work with curiosity and rigour. Reflect on what you have done in the field and how it connects to the body of knowledge.
5. Commit to a sitting date. Preparation without a deadline drifts. Register for an examination date, then structure your study accordingly. Accountability is the simplest productivity tool available to any professional.
The CMRP changed the trajectory of my career. I hope this guidance helps more African practitioners reach that milestone — and helps us collectively raise the standard of the profession on this continent.
Operator Driven Reliability (ODR) is an asset management philosophy that draws operators into the reliability of the assets they use every day. In its simplest formulation, ODR is the structured transfer of basic preventive maintenance tasks from the maintenance team to the operators themselves — freeing skilled technicians to focus on higher-complexity work while simultaneously deepening operators’ ownership of asset performance.
Despite being a well-established element of proactive maintenance strategy, many African industrial facilities have been hesitant to implement ODR. The reasons are understandable — concerns about role boundaries, resistance from trades unions, or the absence of a structured implementation framework. This article addresses each of these barriers and offers a path forward.
What ODR Is — and Is Not. ODR is not about eliminating maintenance jobs. It is about optimising the allocation of technical expertise across the facility. Operators already have the most intimate knowledge of how their equipment behaves — ODR formalises that relationship and gives them the tools and authority to act on it.
Two core benefits of a well-implemented ODR programme: First, asset availability improves because defects are caught earlier — operators notice anomalies at the point of operation, often before they escalate to failures that require maintenance intervention. Second, maintenance teams are liberated to concentrate on planned, complex, and predictive activities — the work that requires specialised skill and that drives the greatest reliability improvement.
Implementation requires three foundations: clear task definitions (what operators are expected to do, in writing and with training), capable operators (investment in competency development, not just a task list), and a feedback loop (a mechanism by which operators can flag anomalies and see that their observations drive action).
Facilities that have implemented ODR successfully — and I have seen this firsthand in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector — report meaningful improvements in both OEE and technician utilisation within twelve to eighteen months. The barrier is never technical. It is cultural. Leadership that makes the case, trains the teams, and follows through consistently will find that operators become the organisation’s most powerful reliability asset.
Asset Condition Information — ACI — is exactly what its name implies: all the information that describes the condition of an asset. It encompasses data, observations, inspection records, and monitored parameters gathered across the full lifecycle of a piece of equipment. It is not merely a snapshot of current state. It is the cumulative condition history of an asset over time.
This distinction matters because decisions about assets made without historical context are inherently limited. A single vibration reading, an isolated oil sample, or one thermographic scan tells you something. But the trend across twelve months of such data tells you far more — it tells you where the asset is headed, how fast, and whether intervention is warranted now or can be safely deferred.
ACI enables three critical capabilities. It supports day-to-day operational decisions — should this equipment run, be monitored, or be taken offline? It enables medium-term planning — when should we schedule an overhaul, and what parts should be pre-positioned? And it informs long-term capital decisions — is this asset approaching end of economic life, or does investment in condition improvement extend its value?
In practice, many African organisations hold more ACI than they realise — in CMMS records, maintenance logs, operator rounds, and inspection reports. The challenge is not data collection so much as data integration and interpretation. ACI that is fragmented across systems or trapped in paper logbooks cannot be acted upon efficiently.
Organisations that invest in consolidating and interpreting their ACI consistently outperform those that do not — in asset availability, in maintenance cost control, and in the quality of their capital planning. ACI is not a software feature. It is a management discipline. And it begins with the decision to treat asset condition as strategic intelligence, not administrative record-keeping.
The aspiration of zero breakdowns is one that serious reliability professionals hold — not as naive idealism, but as the logical destination of a sufficiently mature proactive maintenance programme. The path there runs through defect elimination, and understanding that path is essential for any practitioner who wants to move from reactive firefighting to genuine operational excellence.
Defects are broadly defined as anything that creates waste, reduces production, erodes asset value, or introduces risk to people or the environment. They are routinely traceable to a limited set of root sources: poor storage and handling of materials and spare parts; suboptimal operating practices; inadequate maintenance procedures; and insufficient technician training. None of these root causes are mysterious. All of them are addressable.
Defect elimination is the discipline of finding and removing these causes before they manifest as failures. It requires three capabilities working in concert: detection (identifying that a defect exists, through inspection, monitoring, or operator observation); analysis (understanding what introduced the defect); and remediation (correcting both the immediate defect and the system condition that allowed it to arise).
The organisations that achieve the lowest failure rates I have encountered are not those with the most sophisticated predictive technologies. They are organisations where defect elimination is culturally embedded — where every technician understands that their job is not merely to fix what breaks, but to eliminate the conditions under which things break. That cultural shift is harder than any technology deployment. And it is more durable.
Zero breakdowns may not be perfectly achievable in every industrial context. But the pursuit of it — through rigorous defect elimination — drives organisations measurably closer to it with each passing year. That trajectory is the definition of reliability improvement.
I began my reliability journey properly on the 12th of December 2013, when I sat for the CMRP certification in Nigeria. It was my first serious exposure to reliability as a discipline — despite having spent eight years in the maintenance profession across manufacturing, renewable energy, and oil and gas. That examination changed my perspective. What I encountered in those pillars of knowledge overturned assumptions I had held for most of my career.
After the CMRP, I hungered for more. A chance LinkedIn connection with Terrence O’Hanlon of Reliabilityweb.com introduced me to the Certified Reliability Leader (CRL) programme. Eight months later, I was in Austin, Texas, at the ARMs Reliability conference — experiencing a quality of leadership development and peer exchange that I had not previously encountered in Africa. The CRL process was not simply a certification. It was a reorientation of how I thought about my role as a professional and as a leader.
What followed from that point was the establishment of the Maintenance Institute Africa in 2015, years of annual conferences and training programmes, and ultimately the vision for ASMRA — a professional society built on the conviction that African practitioners deserve exactly the kind of platform, rigour, and community I experienced in Austin, but closer to home, built in our own context, and anchored in our own realities.
The lesson I draw from this journey is not that international certifications are the answer in themselves — though I strongly recommend both the CMRP and CRL to any serious practitioner. The lesson is that benchmarking yourself against the best in the world, connecting with professionals who have that same hunger, and then building something with what you have learned — that is the trajectory that transforms careers. And it is the trajectory ASMRA exists to enable for practitioners across this continent.
Budgeting is the key financial instrument that controls the resources necessary to plan and manage the activities of a maintenance department. Yet in many African organisations, the maintenance budget is treated as a number to be minimised rather than an investment to be optimised. That misframing is expensive — and correctable.
There are two budget types that every maintenance manager must understand. The operating budget covers day-to-day expenses across four categories: labour costs (fixed annual wages and variable overtime), materials (spare parts, consumables, lubricants), tools and technical resources (equipment needed to perform the work), and contracted services (third-party expertise brought in for specialised tasks). Managing these four lines with rigour is the foundation of maintenance financial competence.
The project budget, by contrast, covers capital work — modifications, overhauls, and improvements that fall outside routine operations. Confusing project costs with operational costs is one of the most common budgeting errors in African maintenance departments, and it distorts both the operating budget and the capital expenditure case to leadership.
The most effective maintenance budgets I have encountered are built from the bottom up, using life cycle costing of all maintainable assets. This approach — sometimes called zero-based budgeting — requires more upfront effort, but produces a detailed, defensible list of activities with associated labour and parts costs. When asking leadership for annual funding, a budget built on asset life cycle analysis is infinitely more persuasive than one extrapolated from prior year spend.
The goal of budget administration is not simply to stay within a number. It is to measure the effectiveness of the maintenance programme — to report not just on what was spent, but on what was achieved. Organisations that link their maintenance budget to reliability outcomes consistently make better financial decisions, because they can quantify the cost of both action and inaction.
The best way to deal with a problem is to prevent it. Preventive maintenance (PM) is typically the largest component of any maintenance programme by volume — and it is the area where the gap between good intent and disciplined execution is widest in most African facilities. Understanding the seven foundational elements of PM is the starting point for closing that gap.
1. Inspection. The entry point of any PM programme. Periodic inspection of assets — visual, sensory, and instrument-based — establishes the baseline from which all maintenance decisions flow. Without systematic inspection, maintenance is reactive by default.
2. Servicing. Routine care activities that keep assets in satisfactory operating condition: lubrication, cleaning, filter changes, fluid level checks. These are often undervalued, but the data consistently shows that lubrication failures alone account for a significant proportion of preventable mechanical failures.
3. Calibration. Ensuring that instruments and measurement devices are accurate. In process facilities — particularly in oil and gas — miscalibrated instruments introduce risk at the asset, the process, and the safety level simultaneously.
4. Testing. Functional testing of equipment — particularly protective devices, standby systems, and emergency equipment — to verify that they will perform when called upon. A standby pump that has never been tested under load is not a standby pump. It is a liability.
5. Alignment and Balancing. Mechanical precision in rotating equipment. Misalignment and imbalance are two of the leading causes of bearing failures, seal failures, and vibration-related damage. Correcting them proactively is always less expensive than managing the consequences.
6. Scheduled Overhauls. Time-based replacement or restoration of components that have a known service life. These must be timed correctly — too early and you waste resources; too late and you invite failure. The right timing comes from understanding asset failure patterns, not from convention.
7. Documentation and Review. The PM programme is only as good as the feedback loop that improves it. Every task completed, every finding recorded, every failure that occurs despite PM coverage is data. Organisations that review their PM programmes systematically get better. Organisations that do not, repeat the same failures year after year.
An effective PM programme does not happen by accident. It is designed, resourced, executed, and continuously improved. The organisations across Africa that have invested in this discipline see measurable returns — in uptime, in safety, and in cost. The organisations that have not are paying for it in every unplanned shutdown.
Lean is not a Japanese concept. It is a universal one — and its application in African maintenance environments is both appropriate and urgently needed. At its core, Lean is simply a commitment to doing more with less: less human effort, less equipment time, less material, less space, and less delay — while delivering more value to the customer, the organisation, and the asset.
In a maintenance context, waste takes many forms. It is the technician who spends half his shift looking for a part that should have been staged before the job started. It is the work order that is approved, scheduled, and then not executed because the permit was not ready. It is the equipment that sits idle after a shutdown because the commissioning sequence was not planned. It is the data collected by condition monitoring equipment that no one ever reviews. All of these represent cost without value — and all of them are eliminable.
The Lean concept identifies seven classic categories of waste (often abbreviated as TIMWOOD): Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, and Defects. In maintenance, each of these manifests predictably. Excessive inventory of the wrong spare parts while critical spares are missing. Technicians travelling between stores, workshops, and worksites multiple times per job. Waiting for permits, equipment isolation, or materials that were not staged. Overprocessing through unnecessary sign-offs, approvals, and bureaucratic steps that add time without adding safety or quality.
The most powerful aspect of Lean — and the one most often overlooked in African industrial settings — is that it begins not with tools and techniques, but with the people closest to the process. The people who run the equipment, perform the maintenance tasks, and handle the materials every day are the ones with the most accurate picture of where the waste lives. Lean works when leadership creates the conditions for those people to surface waste and act on it.
The organisations I have worked with in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector that have applied Lean principles to their maintenance operations consistently report the same outcomes: improved wrench time, faster job turnaround, reduced rework, and lower maintenance cost per unit of output. These are not theoretical benefits. They are achievable — and they begin with the decision to look honestly at how work is actually done, rather than how it is supposed to be done.
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