Reliability Is Not a Maintenance Programme
How OQ is turning reliability into a leadership and business question
Reliability programmes often begin with operational pain. A difficult turnaround, unstable production or repeated failures expose weaknesses in the way work is planned and executed. The first response is usually familiar: review the maintenance strategy, add new indicators or launch another improvement project.
But what if the real issue is larger than maintenance?
At OQ Refineries and Petrochemical Industries, or OQ RPI, reliability is being developed as a company-wide business capability. The organisation is examining not only how assets are maintained, but also how leaders make decisions, how departments cooperate and how technical performance is translated into value that executives and shareholders understand.
The transformation is being driven by OQ RPI’s leadership team, asset owners, reliability, maintenance and engineering professionals, including Tamás Balla, Senior Advisor for Reliability, and Attila Kiss, Asset Management Principal, helping connect reliability practices with business strategy, organisational alignment and shareholder expectations. At the Asset Performance Conference in Antwerp, they will share how OQ RPI’s leadership and cross-functional teams are moving from separate initiatives towards a more integrated and sustainable approach.
Their story raises a question familiar to many technical managers: why do some reliability programmes become part of the way a company operates, while others disappear when the initial urgency is gone?
A reliability role outside the technical department
OQ is the national integrated energy investment group of the Sultanate of Oman. Within the group, OQ RPI operates a complex refining and petrochemical environment containing both older and recently constructed assets.
Tamás’s position reflects a deliberate view of reliability. Although his work is highly technical, he does not sit inside a conventional maintenance department. He reports directly to the CEO.
“Reliability is influenced by culture, human competence, operational practices, maintenance, learning from failures, engineering and many other organisational processes,” he explains.
His role is not to take operational responsibility away from the businesses. He acts as a catalyst and independent challenger: assessing maturity, coordinating the wider journey and helping the organisation maintain direction.
Attila operates from the other side of the same bridge. His task is to connect asset management with long-term business strategy and shareholder expectations.
“I try to build a bridge between the technical organisation and the management, shareholders,” he says. “That involves linking asset management objectives to business targets and translating technical improvements into financial value, risk reduction and more predictable performance.”
For technical teams, that bridge can be difficult to construct. Engineers can describe failure modes, work-order quality and equipment strategies in detail. Senior decision-makers must also understand what those issues mean for resilience, investment and the future value of the business.
The question that changed the conversation
Management support for reliability is often strongest after a company has experienced operational pain. Yet urgency does not automatically lead to learning. It can just as easily produce blame, defensive reporting or a series of isolated corrective actions.
Following a difficult turnaround in 2023, Tamás was asked to lead a structured learning-from-failure review. In his first discussion with the CEO, he expected questions about technical causes or departmental performance.
Instead, the CEO asked: “Tamás, what mistakes did I make?” For Tamás, the question revealed an essential condition for sustainable improvement.
“It is unusual to hear that question from a CEO,” he says. “It demonstrated an exceptional willingness to learn and an understanding that reliability starts with leadership.”
The anecdote says more about the OQ approach than an organisational chart. Reliability was not framed as a problem senior management could delegate to maintenance. Leadership itself was part of the system under review.
That principle is easy to express but difficult to implement. If reliability truly belongs to the whole organisation, procurement decisions, operating practices, engineering choices, competence development and management behaviour must all become part of the conversation.
The practical consequences of that idea form an important part of the OQ case—and of the conference session.
From activities to an integrated journey
Before Tamás joined OQ RPI, several important steps had already been taken. Dedicated reliability responsibilities existed, and work had begun on equipment strategies and learning from failures.
The challenge was not a lack of activity. It was the risk that worthwhile initiatives would continue beside one another without becoming a coherent management system.
Tamás began by assessing the processes that influence reliability. The scope extended beyond maintenance planning to leadership, operations, engineering, culture, competence, work execution and performance management.
The organisation then had to make choices. Which weaknesses required immediate attention? Which changes would take several years? Which actions belonged to the operating businesses, and where was stronger coordination needed?
OQ deliberately calls the result a reliability journey rather than a project. A project suggests a finish line. A journey recognises that assets, risks, people and priorities continue to evolve.
“The organisation still has challenges,” Tamás says. “Progress inevitably includes both improvements and setbacks.”
That realism matters. A new process may succeed on paper but fail under production pressure. An indicator may reveal that its data is not trusted. A technically sound initiative may stall because departments have conflicting objectives.
Exactly how OQ selected its priorities and avoided turning the programme into another temporary campaign will be explored during the presentation.
Reliability in the language of business
Long-term sponsorship requires more than evidence that technical performance is improving. Reliability must also be connected to the measures that shape strategic decisions.
“When we reviewed the company’s long-term strategy, we concluded that reliability was one of the main factors determining the long-term value of the business,” Attila explains. “It was not simply a maintenance subject. It was something on which the entire business depended.”
At OQ, the conversation moved beyond maintenance cost. Reliability was considered in relation to availability, business risk and the ability to generate stable results.
“Improved reliability reduces performance volatility,” Attila says. “It makes operational and financial results more consistent and predictable.”
For asset-intensive organisations, that predictability can be as important as a short-term production gain. It supports planning and becomes particularly relevant when a company is restructuring, attracting investment or changing its ownership model.
The difficult part is creating a credible line of sight between plant-level activities and enterprise value. It requires more than attaching a financial estimate to every initiative. It requires clarity about how technical decisions, operational risks and business outcomes are connected.
OQ has developed a structured way of making that connection. The detailed approach—and the questions it raised internally—will be one of the central themes of the conference session.
Proving that the programme is different
Employees who have experienced several improvement programmes are understandably sceptical. New terminology and dashboards may create momentum, only for performance to return to its previous level once attention moves elsewhere.
OQ therefore needed visible proof that its approach could influence daily operations and that the gains could be sustained.
Maintenance execution became one of the first areas in which the difference could be demonstrated. The organisation focused on whether planned work was completed when required, how often schedules were disrupted and whether the work-management system was producing the intended operational effect.
The improvement was substantial, and the impact became visible outside maintenance.
“These were not merely results presented in reports,” Tamás says. “They became visible in the actual performance of the business.”
The figures are compelling, but the more interesting question is what made the result persist. Many organisations can improve a KPI for several months. Fewer embed the ownership and discipline needed to prevent regression.
“The strong alignment between leadership, asset management and operational teams has been a key enabler of success. Reliability is understood as a business priority, not just a technical initiative.” – Attila says.
OQ’s answer involves the relationship between central coordination and operational ownership. The programme provides challenge and assurance, but the businesses remain responsible for implementation.
The session will examine how that balance was created and why sustainability became a more important measure of success than the launch of any single initiative.
Who really owns the asset?
One of the most consequential questions in the OQ journey concerns accountability.
In a traditional functional organisation, operations operates, maintenance maintains and engineering provides support. Each department may perform well while no single leader feels accountable for the complete performance of the asset.
OQ is challenging that division through an asset-owner concept, reflected in the use of the title Asset Vice President rather than Operations Vice President.
The shift is more than semantic. It asks operational leaders to consider technical integrity, maintenance performance, risk and long-term asset health as part of their own accountability. Maintenance and engineering retain responsibility for their specialist work, but they support an asset owner who must understand the combined impact on performance.
“The asset owner remains accountable for the overall performance of the assets,” Tamás says.
That principle changes difficult conversations between functions. Instead of debating whether a result belongs to operations or maintenance, the organisation can ask what the asset requires and who must act.
It also brings a familiar tension into focus: how should leaders balance immediate production demand with long-term asset health? The governance mechanisms OQ uses to support that balance will be discussed in Antwerp.
When leaders compete to become the pilot
Not every sign of progress appears in a dashboard.
During one of Tamás’s early workshops, he explained how better equipment strategies could support operational performance. A pilot had already been agreed with one Asset Vice President.
After the workshop, another Asset Vice President asked for the pilot to be moved to his area. When told that another refinery had already been selected, the two leaders began debating which of them should be allowed to implement the initiative first.
“I could hardly believe that two senior operational leaders were competing to become the first pilot area for a reliability initiative,” Tamás recalls. “At that moment, I realised that I had joined the right organisation.”
The story does not mean the transformation was easy. It reveals something more fundamental: the willingness to improve already existed.
“In other organisations, we first had to spend considerable effort convincing people that reliability mattered,” Attila says. “At OQ, management understands its importance, and this greatly supports the transformation.”
For managers building programmes across sites and functions, that raises an important question. Once leadership is interested, how can that interest be converted into consistent decisions and behaviour?
The part no dashboard can solve
The OQ programme includes technical strategies, performance indicators and work-management improvements. Yet Tamás believes that at least half of the challenge lies elsewhere: “The human component represents at least 50 per cent of the challenge.”
Failure analysis showed that behaviour and compliance with standard operating procedures contributed to unreliability. That could not be addressed by issuing another procedure or demanding more discipline.
The organisation had to examine how leaders communicate, whether employees understand the purpose behind standards and why people deviate under pressure. Reliability culture therefore became more than technical training. It began to include leadership behaviour, psychology and the ability to create commitment rather than temporary compliance.
OQ has also worked to establish a shared reliability language across functions and management levels. The aim is not to turn every executive into an engineer, but to ensure that procurement, operations, commercial teams, engineering and maintenance understand how their decisions influence the same system.
Tools can be purchased and processes documented. Building belief and ownership across an organisation requires a different kind of intervention. The presentation will provide a closer view of how OQ combines these hard and soft elements.
A session about the architecture behind the results
OQ RPI has already seen meaningful operational progress, but Tamás and Attila do not present the journey as complete.
The value of the case lies not in one KPI or organisational change. It lies in the architecture connecting leadership, business strategy, asset ownership, maintenance execution, data and culture.
The most important questions therefore remain open. How did OQ decide where to begin? How was reliability translated into language that could influence senior executives and shareholders? How did the organisation prevent improvements from fading? And what happened when technical processes encountered cultural and organisational barriers?
At the Asset Performance Conference, Tamás Balla, Attila Kiss, the Asset Management Vice President and their OQ colleagues will take participants behind those decisions, highlighting the collective effort required to embed reliability across the organisation. Their session is intended for professionals who are no longer asking whether reliability matters, but how to make it a durable part of the way an asset-intensive business is led.
While the conference session will highlight methodologies, governance and asset management practices, the achievements described are ultimately the result of a collective effort across OQ RPI. From senior leadership to front-line teams, the organisation has demonstrated a strong commitment to collaboration, continuous improvement and long-term thinking.
Because the most difficult reliability failures do not always begin in the equipment. Sometimes they begin in the space between departments, priorities and decisions.