The second step in building maintenance reliability, after the review of the CMMS system as discussed in the previous blog, is asset prioritization/criticalities. This step, although it might seem intuitive, must be done properly. Too many assets with priorities set higher than needed will raise maintenance costs. Operations tend to request that all assets be rated as top priority. After all everything is needed to run production properly at low cost or so operations believes. However, this only raises maintenance costs due to over-investment of maintenance resources on non-critical assets. Conveyors, spiral wrappers, lift trucks, are many items that generally should have lower asset priorities. These assets can either be worked around when down, or there is possibly duplication available in other areas of the plant.
The steps to asset prioritization or criticalities include the following:
1. Presentation to all key stake holders educating about criticalities ratings, advantages, disadvantages, effects on maintenance cost, related maintenance strategy development.
2. List of all assets for criticalities analysis.
3. List of the various facets of analysis.
4. Meeting with all key stake holders to assign asset criticality ratings.

Asset criticalities should be determined by a team of representatives from:
· Environmental Health and Safety
· Maintenance
· Engineering
· Productions/operations
· Quality
· Plant management

Asset criticalities should be tied to business case / economic justification based on identification of negative impacts to business profitability. There are many different facets that should be considered for analysis. This blog will list a few examples. Each asset should be analyzed for impact to business based on failure. Some of the areas of impact analyzed will include:
1. Environmental impact due to failure
2. Safety and health impact due to failure
3. Lost profits due to failure
4. Increased costs due to failure
5. Scrap/quality costs due to failure
6. Ability to manufacture due to failure
7. Other business cases specific to the manufacturing environment
This is just a quick list to convey the idea. Each item on the list should be rated 1 to 10 by the team. Adding up all the ratings for each asset will yield a raw criticality number.

The raw criticality numbers should be analyzed. They should be broken into a criticality ranking of 1 through 3 or 5 at most. This will yield groups of assets with the same level of business related impacts should failure occur. This data is then used in the CMMS system to prioritize work lists, maintenance strategies, and allocate the limited maintenance resources to avoid the largest negative impact to the business.

The last step the criticality analysis team must address deals with the less critical equipment. Since these assets are not viewed as highly critical, maintenance could choose the run to failure option. This being the case, the team will need to agree on official countermeasures for all the less critical assets in case of failure. The more critical assets are rated higher because of business impact and the inability to recover from failures. Maintenance strategies must focus on these assets to eliminate failure modes. This is the duty of the maintenance/reliability department.

Tweet This Post