Resources
Blog
Criticality Analysis and CMMS: Using Data to Prioritize Maintenance

Criticality Analysis and CMMS: Using Data to Prioritize Maintenance

Contents

See MaintainX in action

Take a live, one-on-one tour with a product expert to see how MaintainX can help you go paper-free and reduce costly unplanned downtime.
Book a Tour

For many organizations, knowing which assets take priority over another isn’t always clear-cut. This is where a criticality analysis and a CMMS can help.

Criticality measures how integral a piece of equipment is to your business.

Sometimes asset criticality can be obvious. For example, if you run an industrial spray painting company, your compressed air system is vital to getting the job done. As a result, you’d need to address any unplanned compressor downtime immediately. Likewise, you’d need to prioritize any maintenance of your compressor, pipework, air dryer, and filtration systems over maintenance of less critical equipment.

What Is Asset Criticality Analysis?

As your business matures and increases in complexity, the number of assets and equipment to service and maintain grows exponentially.

This can present several new challenges. How do you know what assets impact your ability to fulfill orders for your customers? What gets fixed first? And when budgets are tight, where can you safely reduce maintenance costs? A criticality analysis can help answer these questions.

A criticality analysis is a tool used to prioritize asset management and maintenance. The tool is a quantitative way to approach your maintenance strategy, using numeric values to rate each piece of equipment on factors such as the seriousness of a potential failure.

Why Perform a Criticality Analysis?

With the data you collect from your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), you can view and analyze historical work orders, preventive maintenance information, and asset failure reports.

Now, armed with this data and insights from your maintenance team, you can gain clearer and more actionable insights into what assets impact productivity most. You can then confidently allocate funds to essential maintenance management tasks.

These insights also help you optimize spare parts inventory management, use your maintenance resources more effectively, and identify necessary upgrades of aging equipment.

Furthermore, one additional reason to perform criticality analysis is to avoid “cost consequence,” the total business impact of that asset’s failure.

“The cost consequence is not just the cost of lost production and the cost of the repair, but also includes cost related to safety, the environment, quality, the organization’s reputation, etc. The cost consequence is the failure frequency is an estimated number. This is a probability based on history or industry norms for similar situations and updated as new asset knowledge is developed.”
Reliability Web

The Big Picture: Reliability-Centered Maintenance and FMEA

Criticality analysis works best when you apply it as part of a more extensive failure analysis methodology, such as a failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and overarching frameworks, such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM).

These approaches seek to understand the wide range of influences that impact the operability of an asset–factors like design or maintenance program inefficiencies–and uncover the root causes of why an asset fails.

However, FMECA (including C for Criticality) takes the simple cause-and-effect analysis a step further. Here, you conduct a risk assessment for each failure mode. This is the essence of criticality analysis. You calculate which assets are at high risk of failure. Then, you adjust your asset operations and maintenance program accordingly.

“When looking at your assets, you’ve got to understand the consequence to the business. You could have a pump that’s outside that might pump runoff water for no reason… And you have the same exact pump that’s pumping oil to your food manufacturing process to make a recipe. It could be the same two pumps, but the consequences to the business are completely different.”
Plant Services

How to Perform a Criticality Analysis Using Hard Data

There are several schools of thought on how to approach asset criticality analysis. Some methods take an “all assets are equal” approach. Here you give the same amount of attention (and funds) to vital assets as to less critical pieces of equipment.

However, other approaches are subjective. These are based on your maintenance team’s perceived risk of breakdowns or the difficulty and complexity of previous maintenance tasks.

While you should consider your team’s input, you should combine it with data from your maintenance software to give a more accurate picture of asset performance.

This quantitative approach uses a Risk Priority Number or RPN to indicate which critical equipment you should prioritize.

How to Calculate Risk Priority Number (RPN)

To calculate an asset’s risk priority number, follow this formula:

RPN = S × O × D

S = Severity of the impact of failure

O = Likelihood of failure occurring

D = Ease of detecting the failure

Your business can apply its own criticality ranking matrix to each element of this equation, using a scale of 1 to 10. Each number represents a documented and agreed-upon set of criteria.

By the way, this is a great example of where standard operating procedures can assist teams in maintaining consistency in ranking asset maintenance metrics.

Your final RPN receives a level of risk based on a numerical scale. For example, you should prioritize maintenance efforts for an asset with an RPN score of 90 over equipment with an RPN of 20.

What CMMS Data Should I Analyze?

As you can see, the success and accuracy of your criticality analysis rely heavily on data. This is where you can lean on your CMMS to sense-check anecdotal evidence.

A CMMS can capture data on every asset in your facility. While this is helpful for day-to-day tasks like health and safety checklists and equipment inspections, it also allows you to tap into a huge library of historical data.

When performing an asset criticality assessment, you can consider CMMS metrics such as:

Pull It All Together with MaintainX

Asset analysis is more straightforward with MaintainX. You can get accurate real-time data across the whole equipment life cycle. With this data, you and your team can accurately assess the criticality of each piece of equipment, streamline maintenance workflows, reduce costs, and ensure your assets are being proactively managed and maintained.

Schedule a demo, or try MaintainX yourself. It’s free, easy to use, and designed for collaboration.

FAQs

No items found.
author photo

Caroline Eisner

Caroline Eisner is a writer and editor with experience across the profit and nonprofit sectors, government, education, and financial organizations. She has held leadership positions in K16 institutions and has led large-scale digital projects, interactive websites, and a business writing consultancy.

Learn more

CMMS Implementation
Blog Post

The Ultimate Guide to Successful CMMS Implementation

MaintainX Editorial Team
Dec 10, 2024
CMMS Benefits
Blog Post

20 CMMS Benefits: Transforming Maintenance Management in Modern Operations

MaintainX Editorial Team
Nov 29, 2024
Discover 5 key insights from Fabtech 2024 on cutting manufacturing downtime. From outdated systems to predictive maintenance, learn strategies to drive efficiency and growth.
Blog Post
Manufacturing

Manufacturing's $8,000-a-Minute Problem: 5 Key Insights from Fabtech 2024

Nick Haase
Nov 26, 2024
Digital transformation in a manufacturing environment using unified namespace to connect to the OT data
Blog Post
Manufacturing

The Crucial Role of Work Execution in Unified Namespace: Bridging Data and Action in Manufacturing

Nick Haase
Nov 25, 2024
work order tracking
Blog Post

Work Order Tracking Guide

MaintainX Editorial Team
Nov 15, 2024
paperless work order system
Blog Post

Switching To Paperless Work Order Systems

MaintainX Editorial Team
Nov 15, 2024
An engineering tech performing work with a CMMS.
Blog Post
Manufacturing

Skilled Workers Wanted: A New Perspective on the Manufacturing Labor Gap

Nick Haase
Nov 15, 2024
Work Order Automation
Blog Post

How to Leverage Automation for Work Order Management

MaintainX Editorial Team
Nov 12, 2024
Work Order Management Process
Blog Post

Understanding the Work Order Management Process

MaintainX Editorial Team
Sep 30, 2024
Work Order Prioritization
Blog Post

How To Prioritize Work Orders To Drive Efficiency

Sep 30, 2024
Asset Connect helps OEMs improve customer relationships.
Blog Post
Manufacturing

The $50 Billion Problem: How OEMs Can Tackle Unplanned Downtime and Boost Customer Satisfaction

Vicky Wu
Sep 19, 2024
maintenance software
Blog Post

Choosing The Best Predictive Maintenance Software

Lekan Olanrewaju
Sep 11, 2024
Nov 7, 2024
Maintenance Management Software
Blog Post

The Best Maintenance Management Software

Lekan Olanrewaju
Sep 11, 2024
Nov 7, 2024
MaintainX Asset Connect: Empowering OEMs, Exceeding Customer Expectations
Blog Post
Manufacturing

MaintainX Asset Connect: Empowering OEMs, Exceeding Customer Expectations

Chris Turlica, CEO and Co-Founder
Sep 3, 2024
MaintainX named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape
Blog Post
Manufacturing

MaintainX Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS CMMS Application 2024

Doug Roberge
Aug 28, 2024
An engineering technician in a control room.
Blog Post
Manufacturing

Fewer Outages, Higher Costs: The Unplanned Downtime Paradox

Nick Haase
Aug 26, 2024
Join us at booth #339178 to explore AI-driven maintenance software for Industry 4.0.
Blog Post
Manufacturing

MaintainX Bridges the Digital Divide at IMTS 2024: Where Software Meets Metal

Nick Haase
Aug 19, 2024
Two men using MaintainX on a mobile device to input data for AI learning.
Blog Post

AI-Powered Maintenance: Creating a Foundation Today for Tomorrow’s Innovation

Nick Haase
Aug 12, 2024
Blog Post

How to Create a Digital Inventory Management System (and Never Stock Out Again)

Lekan Olanrewaju
Dec 11, 2023
Blog Post

How to Choose the Right Maintenance Strategy for Your Team

Lekan Olanrewaju
Nov 28, 2023

Get more done with MaintainX

Screenshot of MaintainX application showing asset onlineScreenshot of MaintainX application in mobile app showing assets