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

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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

Every high-performing maintenance program starts with a decision: where to focus first. That’s where criticality analysis comes in. It’s the foundation for smarter planning, fewer surprises, and more reliable operations.

This post is the first in a series exploring what it takes to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, predictive maintenance. We’ll start with criticality analysis, then dive into strategies for prioritization, tiered maintenance, and how to align your tools and team with what matters most.

The Criticality Analysis: The Foundation of a High-Performing Maintenance Program

Setting up a high-performing maintenance program starts with a “criticality analysis.” It is one of the fundamental tools for starting a reliability program.

In a criticality analysis, you evaluate all the assets or machines for which you are responsible and classify them so that you and your team have a clear understanding of which assets require immediate attention and which assets can wait. Criticality analysis is essential for minimizing reactive maintenance activities.

A criticality analysis can be structured in many ways, but the fundamental steps are discussed in the sections below.

Asset List and Score

Making a list of the assets in your plant or for which you have responsibility. Seeing this list in its entirety for the first time is often an eye-opening experience in itself.

Score each asset against basic criteria, for example:

• How important is this asset to personnel safety?
• How much does this asset affect the company’s ability to make money?
• How expensive is the asset to repair (or how much value rests on preventing this asset from failure)?
• Does this asset have any redundancies, backups, replacement parts on-hand?
• What is the relative urgency to repair the asset if it fails?

You may add other considerations to the scoring criteria, for example:

• Does asset failure cause the company to be out of compliance with regulatory standards or other key policies? (such as EPA, OSHA, union, GAAP or accounting)
• Will failure cause the company to waste significant amounts of energy, water or waste disposal fees or experience other losses?
• Does asset failure have an impact on product quality or process yield?
• Does this asset have a relatively high risk of unexpected failure or failure without advanced warning?

Once you have scored all of your assets, the criticality analysis is essentially a ranked list of how each asset stacks up in order of relative priority.

Don’t Get Stuck on Scoring Perfection

Let’s pause here to mention something important about scoring your assets. People tend to get overly hung-up on the precision and perfection of their scoring criteria. They worry about scoring something incorrectly and building their entire maintenance program on a flawed criticality analysis.

Your criticality analysis is a living document that will evolve over time, as you get more data. Think of the first criticality analysis as being a lot like a personal budget — 75% of the benefit comes just from writing something down on paper, regardless of whether it is perfect. The criticality analysis will automatically improve itself as time passes and data are collected and leveraged. Using it and building your maintenance program upon it is the important step.

Move Forward and Build Your Maintenance Program

Now you can build a program that allows you to make informed maintenance decisions and spend time and resources that have the greatest impact on the company’s operations, instead of reacting to every problem or emergency as it arises.

You have a foundation to start prioritizing which assets are the most critical. However, with limited time and resources, how do you make sure every thing is covered?

What you have is a criticality dilemma, and we’ll be focusing on this in the next module.

Read Part 2 → The Criticality Dilemma: So Many Assets, So Little Time

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.