What is Asset Criticality Analysis?
A criticality analysis is a systematic approach for determining the relative ranking of assets in a plant or system. The purpose is to objectively rank assets and form a collective agreement and analysis.
The criticality analysis has defined criteria that outlines the potential consequences so that they can be evaluated, categorized and prioritized. Using the defined criteria for each major area of risk ensure all equipment is evaluation with comparable and validated criteria.
Why Asset Criticality Analysis?
An accurate criticality ranking enables reliability leaders to
- Identify the most critical assets – usually 10 to 20% - for further analysis using Failure Modes and Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA);
- Determine maintenance strategy (CBM, FTM, OTF);
- Prioritize work orders;
- Provide information to define escalation processes to reduce risk for all plant assets;
- Make better overall risk management decisions;
- Optimize maintenance costs by focusing on the most critical assets;
- Decide the priority to replace an asset.
Criticality ranking provides cross-functional benefits for all parts of the organization: it adds value to Operations in terms of turnarounds, shutdowns, and job orders; Quality, Compliance, Environmental, Health, and Safety can identify the priorities for plant and project planning; and better decisions can be made with regard to capital expenditure and future budgeting.
Not utilizing analysis tools and information to manage plant assets also results in wasted time and money. Criticality analysis is the tool to use if you want to improve reliability and manage plant assets based on risk instead of perception.
Asset Criticality Analysis factors and criteria
Gathering input from operations, maintenance, engineering, materials management and EH&S representatives can replace individual perceptions of criticality with agreement and better understanding. As the cross-functional team identifies characteristics significant to the business, everyone learns from others’ points of view. Examples of characteristics that could be used to analyze assets include:
- Business Factors
- Customer impact (output);
- Quality on final product impact;
- Environmental impact;
- Health, and Safety impact;
- Utilization (number of shifts by hours)
- Redundancy
- Equipment Factors
- Ability to isolate/recover from single-point-failures
- Failure rate
- Mean-Time-Between-Failures (MTBF) or “Reliability”
- Preventive Maintenance (PM) history
- Corrective Maintenance (CM) history
- MTTR;
- Spares lead-time
- Downtime costs
- Maintenance costs
Before start the Asset, Criticality Analysis validate the Factors and criteria (levels for scoring). This should be validated by all the areas involved.
