North Star Reliability was built to help utilities, municipalities, and industrial facilities improve the way they manage maintenance, assets, and reliability.

My name is Chris Cogan, and I started North Star Reliability after spending years working directly in the water and wastewater industry. My background is not theoretical. I have managed maintenance planning, preventive maintenance programs, asset data, contractor coordination, capital projects, and CMMS improvements inside real operating facilities where equipment uptime matters every day.

I understand the challenges many organizations face because I have worked through them firsthand: aging infrastructure, limited staffing, incomplete asset data, inconsistent preventive maintenance, growing backlogs, contractor coordination issues, and CMMS systems that are often underused or difficult to manage.

North Star Reliability exists to bridge the gap between good intentions and practical execution.

Practical Reliability Support for Real-World Operations

Many facilities know they need better maintenance systems, but they do not always have the time, staffing, or internal structure to build them. That is where North Star Reliability helps.

We work with teams to improve maintenance programs, organize asset information, strengthen preventive maintenance, build useful KPIs, improve CMMS/EAM workflows, and create reliability systems that are realistic for the people who actually have to use them.

The goal is not to create paperwork for the sake of paperwork. The goal is to help maintenance and operations teams make better decisions, reduce reactive work, improve equipment performance, and create systems that are clear, repeatable, and sustainable.

Built from Field Experience

My experience includes working across wastewater treatment facilities, pump stations, and collection system assets, with responsibility for planning and scheduling maintenance work, improving preventive maintenance programs, supporting asset management efforts, coordinating contractors, and helping manage capital improvement projects.

I hold certifications in project management, reliability, and process improvement, including:

PMP – Project Management Professional
CMRP – Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional
Lean Six Sigma Green Belt

These credentials support the work, but the real value comes from applying those principles in operating environments where crews are busy, budgets are limited, and downtime has real consequences.

Who We Help

North Star Reliability works with:

Municipal utilities
Wastewater and water treatment facilities
Public works departments
Industrial facilities
Maintenance managers
Plant managers
Public works directors
Small municipalities without dedicated reliability staff

Whether you are trying to clean up your CMMS, improve preventive maintenance, evaluate your maintenance program, build better asset data, or create a practical reliability roadmap, North Star Reliability can help you move from scattered information and reactive work toward a more organized, measurable maintenance system.

Our Approach

North Star Reliability is built around a simple idea:

Reliability you can measure. Improvements you can feel.

That means we focus on work that creates visible operational improvement. We help turn maintenance data into useful decisions, convert asset lists into actionable priorities, and build systems that teams can actually maintain after the engagement is complete.

Our approach is practical, collaborative, and grounded in real facility experience. We do not believe in handing over generic reports that sit on a shelf. We believe in building tools, workflows, and recommendations that help teams do the work better.

Why North Star Reliability

Facilities do not need more complexity. They need clarity.

North Star Reliability helps organizations identify where their maintenance program stands today, what gaps are creating risk, and what steps will produce the highest-value improvements.

The focus is always on helping teams answer practical questions:

Are we maintaining the right assets at the right frequency?
Is our CMMS giving us useful information or just storing work orders?
Which assets create the highest operational risk?
Where is reactive work consuming the most time and money?
What should we fix first?
How do we measure whether our maintenance program is actually improving?

North Star Reliability helps answer those questions and build a clear path forward.