Leadership teams routinely establish ambitious reliability goals, but those objectives alone do not tell technicians and frontline managers what actions they need to take each day or why those actions matter. When strategy isn't translated into clear expectations, reliability programs will stall out long before they deliver their intended results.

As Chris Hileman, reliability engineering manager at Amazon explained, “When strategy is not clearly defined, it’s not actionable work.”

The presentations at Ultrasound World 2026 from reliability leaders at Amazon, FedEx, Irving Tissue and Paper Mill, and UE Systems emphasized that successful reliability programs need leaders to translate executive goals into clear expectations and shared ownership. Without standards, each site or each technician may interpret the mission differently, creating inconsistent execution and unreliable results.

Throughout the conference, I noticed that conversations about technology kept shifting back to alignment. I heard many speakers say different versions of the same theme: technology is great, but it only creates value when organizations change how people work and translate strategy and tools into daily actions. Here are four steps to turn reliability strategy into everyday practice.

1. The strategy-to-action gap: Leaders must define what good looks like

A common failure point in reliability programs is the gap between leadership intent and frontline execution. Although leadership may have a clear business objective—improve reliability or reduce reactive maintenance or increase asset performance—those goals must be translated into specific behaviors. 
Hileman described this challenge at Amazon, where thousands of sites must execute reliability practices consistently. If sites are told, go do ultrasound routes, and that’s all. ”Out of 2,000 sites, how many different examples do you think we're going to have?” he asked.

Without standards defining what equipment should be monitored, how often inspections should occur, and what actions should follow the findings, each site creates its own version of reliability. “You have to set a strategy. You have to set those standards,” Hileman said.

For reliability programs to scale, organizations must establish common definitions and outline worker expectations. “We have to define what good looks like,” Hileman said. “You don't want people, leadership especially, to assume. You have to spell it out for them.”

Standards create consistency across locations, but they also give frontline workers a clear target, and managers need to define what successful execution means. That might include:
• which assets require monitoring 
• how inspections should be performed 
• how findings should be documented 
• how problems should be prioritized 
• who owns follow-up actions.

The goal is not to remove local decision-making. Instead, standards allow teams to adapt while still working toward the same outcome. “You have to make sure you have consistent definitions, and consistent methods and procedures,” Hileman said. 

2. Managers must own reliability before technicians can embrace it

While frontline involvement is critical, several speakers emphasized that reliability cannot become a technician-only responsibility. Stephen Ford, maintenance engineer at FedEx, said one of the biggest barriers was maintenance managers treating reliability as something they could delegate. “Our facility maintenance managers [FMMs] would just push it off to the side,” Ford said, focusing it one or two technicians.

The organization saw improvement when managers became active participants. “We have seen a change in that here recently of more buy-in from the FMMs,” Ford said. “If you have the buy-in from the facility maintenance managers, you're going to have a better product. Just because if they're buying into it, usually the technicians are going to buy into it.”

Management involvement signals that reliability is not an additional task assigned to technicians. It is part of how the organization operates. Jeremy Bey of UE Systems described a similar lesson from his time working with FedEx. “At the successful sites, the manager was in training with us, and he sat down there with us and talked to us and figured out what does my crew need, what goes into this, what should I expect, what's a realistic expectation with it?” he said.

3. Reliability training must explain the “why”

Employees up and down the corporate ladder must understand why new reliability practices matter and how their daily decisions support broader business goals. Bey described how site visits and conversations changed the perception of reliability initiatives. “Going out to the sites and actually explaining to them the why, what was behind it,” he said, changed the response. Transitioning from compliance to ownership is the foundation of any culture change.

Leadership may communicate one objective, but the message changes as it moves through organizational layers. “Well, the executive team, they set forth all the strategic intent. They're going to improve reliability. They want to reduce downtime, increase asset performance,” Hileman said.

But then:

“It trickles down. Oh, have we all heard of the telephone game? I tell you, you tell them, they tell them, they tell them, and by the time it gets down there, it's a completely different directive,” he added.

Leaders avoid the telephone game by translating strategy into clear expectations and behaviors at every level of the organization. “A gap emerges when strategy isn't translated into specific executable actions,” Hileman said.

4. Reliability ownership cannot remain with a few specialists

Even with clear standards, reliability programs struggle when ownership remains concentrated within a small group of experts. At Irving Tissue and Paper Mill, Nikolas Allen, junior reliability engineers, described how the organization expanded root cause analysis (RCA) beyond the reliability team. Initially, RCA was managed by a small number of reliability professionals. “Starting last year, it was just me and my counterpart for the other half of the mill, doing RCAs, running the meetings, following all the action items through start to finish,” Allen said.

The organization realized that the program could not scale if only reliability engineers owned problem-solving. The responsibility and understanding needed to spread throughout the workforce. “Now we've expanded it,” Allen said. “We've got our process engineers doing RCAs, facilitating them. We even have technicians doing their own mini root cause analysis, just solving their everyday problems.”

Allen shared an example: “I got a text message yesterday, just sitting here. They shut a motor down because it got hot, and instead of just replacing the motor, they actually went to try to figure out what was causing that area to get hot.” The team discovered a runout issue on the gearbox that was out of spec. That problem may have been missed if they had simply replaced the failing motor.

Expanding ownership does not mean making everyone responsible for everything. Reliability still requires clear accountability. As Jeremy Bey, strategic accounts leader at UE Systems, summarized the challenge: “The work can be shared, but ownership can't have too many people trying to own the program. You need to have somebody that really owns it but also owns it at different levels.” 

On the other side, reliability cannot belong to one department or one role. Executives must define the vision, manager must reinforce expectations, and frontline teams must execute the behaviors that improve asset performance. Shared participation and clear responsibility from executive leadership to technicians, who all understand what reliability means and how their actions support it. That’s reliability strategy turned into action.