Criticality Analysis Part 3: Beyond “Critical” – A Better Way to Classify Your Assets

Quick Access

Criticality Analysis Part 1: Why Criticality Analysis Is the First Step Toward Maintenance Maturity

Criticality Analysis Part 2: The Criticality Dilemma – So Many Assets, So Little Time

Criticality Analysis Part 3: Beyond “Critical” – A Better Way to Classify Your Assets

Criticality Analysis Part 4: What Maintenance Teams Can Learn From Healthcare Triage

Criticality Analysis Part 5: Tiered Maintenance – Matching Tools and Talent to Asset Risk

Criticality Analysis Part 6 : From Screening to Correction – The Complete Predictive Maintenance Workflow

In Part 2 of this series, we explored why traditional approaches to criticality—binary thinking, dynamic lists, stretched schedules, or full coverage—tend to fall short. If none of those work long-term, what does?

In this post, we introduce a more practical way to classify assets that helps teams move from overwhelmed to in control.

A Better Way to Classify Assets

A better way to manage a criticality dilemma is to move away from a simple critical or non-critical framework and reclassify your assets into groups with important distinctions.

You can take all of the criticality scoring criteria that we discussed earlier and use it to answer this one simple question:

What impact does this asset have on the company’s ability to generate revenue?

Based on this question, we can group assets into four classes:

• Star Athlete
• Critical
• Semicritical
• Noncritical

Star Athlete

Star athlete refers to those assets that directly determine the company’s ability to win and by how much. It goes beyond simple uptime and downtime. A direct relationship exists between each percent of incremental performance and the company’s incremental revenue.

Every last drop of incremental improvement means additional revenue. This is where maintenance has to be at its pinnacle. These assets need constant attention and monitoring, whether they are brand new or 30 years old.

Real-world examples of star athletes might include turbine generators, a large engine inside a ship, or a large process kiln or furnace.

Many continuous-process industries such as Oil & Gas or Chemical Processing have multiple assets that are star athletes. In contrast, many basic manufacturing plants have no star athletes.

Some companies have just one or two star athletes, but process industries often have many interconnected star athletes, and they often have the maintenance teams, budgets and tools to show for it.

Critical

Critical assets are those that must be up-and-running in order for the company to make money. Performance is less of an issue than whether the asset is “on or off”.

As long as things are spinning, or conveyors are moving, or hydraulics are actuating, the company can generate revenue. This is where uptime is the key performance indicator and where the ability to anticipate pending failures is highly valuable.

It is important to point out that star athlete and critical assets don’t have to be big, expensive, complex or heavy-duty. Sometimes, a Chemical process depends on a simple solenoid valve, or a Food Processing line depends on a $20-motor dispensing material from a hopper. Criticality is all about the effect the asset has on the ability to generate revenue.

Semicritical

Semicritical assets refer to assets that don’t necessarily stop production with their downtime, but they strain the system. For example, a warehouse or distribution center may have four forklifts. If one of those fails, things keep moving, but the remaining forklifts must work 33% faster or longer.

Other examples are:

• A line of pumps in a wastewater treatment plant and one goes down. Operations continue, but the remaining pumps will be required to move more water.
• A rivet press fails, and four production personnel have to manually drive the rivets to maintain production volume.

In some cases, a company or a process can only tolerate the loss of a semicritical asset temporarily before it becomes unsustainable or the process falls too far out of balance.

Noncritical

Noncritical assets are exactly what you would expect. They are assets that do not affect the company’s ability to generate revenue. No matter how big, expensive, complex, or heavy-duty the asset might be, if it does not generate revenue, it is noncritical.

Examples are:

• The exotic fish aquarium in the lobby of the building
• The slow-rotating company sign in front of the plant

Some companies may be a municipal service, public facility or nonprofit organization. They may not generate revenue. Fulfilling the company’s mission, meeting the required level of service or operating within budget can replace the idea of making money.

Putting It All Together

Criticality classifications are unique to each company. At a small startup company, HVAC may be considered a noncritical luxury. At most companies, the HVAC system is semicritical, but the length of time that it can go unrepaired before it impacts revenue depends greatly on the season.

At a large commercial facility, HVAC failure means that everyone is dismissed from work until it gets fixed and service level agreements are violated and fines are assessed.

In a semi-conductor fabrication plant or a large frozen food warehouse, or a science laboratory, or medical facility, the HVAC system may well be a star athlete.

Now that you have a more precise way to classify assets, you still need to make sure that your maintenance resources (people, experience and equipment) can handle the criticality dilemma.

For that, the next module examines the health-care industry to see how they allocate people, time, training and technology.

Read Part 4 → What Maintenance Teams Can Learn From Healthcare Triage

Author Bio: John Bernet is a Mechanical Application and Product Specialist at Fluke Corporation. Using his 30-plus years of experience in maintenance and operation of nuclear power plants and machinery in commercial plants, John has worked with customers in all industries implementing reliability programs. He is a Certified Category II Vibration Analyst and a Certified Maintenance Reliability Professional (CMRP), with over 20 years of experience diagnosing machine faults.