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Criticality Analysis - What It Is and Why It's Important
Criticality Analysis - What It Is and Why It's Important
According to the Life Cycle Institute, a criticality analysis model should cover
multiple areas of your organization including:
Customer impact
Impact on safety and environment
Ability to isolate single-point failures
Preventive maintenance (PM) history
Corrective maintenance history
Mean time between failures (MTBF)
Spare parts lead time
Probability of failure
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4/24/2020 Criticality Analysis: What It Is and Why It’s Important
It can help identify high-level risk mitigation strategies for specific equipment.
For example, this could involve applying a condition monitoring technique to
high-criticality assets.
It can assist with figuring out the optimum number of spare parts for each piece
of equipment.
It can provide valuable input for budgeting discussions, so high-criticality
equipment is given higher priority for upgrades or replacement.
Criticality analysis helps reliability engineers focus their efforts and energy on
the most critical assets.
So, where should you start? Many organizations just want to know which assets
should be included in a criticality assessment. Instead of assuming all your assets
are critical, make a list of the key assets your team thinks are critical and calculate
the cost of downtime and repairs. You might be surprised by the results. For
example, you may have hundreds of motors in constant motion, which are fairly
critical, but the most critical asset is the boiler making steam to keep those motors
in motion.
Since the point of this approach is to find a good starting point, let's take a look at
some action steps you can take to get started on a criticality plan.
Compile a list of assets to cut that won't exceed 20 percent of all assets. Best
practice for this is a 5-to-1 or greater ratio.
Put together a team of personnel from the operations, maintenance,
engineering and procurement side of the organization to conduct a survey of
the plant equipment. Equipment operators should be included in this team as
well.
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Next, rank the criticality of the assets using an established formula. Lifetime
Reliability Solutions uses the following formula to determine the financial
impact of an asset: Equipment Criticality = Failure Frequency (per year) x Cost
Consequence ($) = Risk ($ per year). The cost consequence in this formula is
the cost of lost production plus the repair costs. For example, if you have a lot
of identical machines, machine downtime might be $400 per hour, per
machine.
Now that you have a basic idea on how to get started, let's look at a more in-depth,
streamlined approach to criticality analysis. This method includes three steps:
agree on the risk matrix to be used, assemble your equipment hierarchy and
assess the failure risks for each asset.
1. Agree on the risk matrix. This mainly refers to existing corporate risk
matrices and how most of these matrices may need to be adjusted to include
an equipment criticality assessment. Two key areas where modifications might
be needed are agreeing on risk levels from a corporate and equipment level,
and combining the overlapping risk categories.
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4/24/2020 Criticality Analysis: What It Is and Why It’s Important
On a corporate level,
than if your asset hierarchy is organized by equipment class lines. Even if your
assets are already organized along functional lines, they should still be
reviewed to make sure nothing is out of line. Having a properly assembled
hierarchy at the beginning speeds up the criticality analysis later.
3. Assess each asset's failure risks. When assessing the failure risks to help
determine equipment criticality, consider the following points:
1. understand risk relates to events, not equipment;
2. choose only one event – the maximum reasonable outcome (MRO) event;
3. look at only the dimension with the highest risk level; and
4. start at the top of the hierarchy and work your way down.
Secondly, each piece of equipment can have a myriad of possible failure
events, and the risks associated with each of those events are different. It
would be extremely time-consuming to try and identify all these possible
events. Multiple reliability consultants and experts recommend choosing only
one event – the one that best portrays the maximum reasonable outcome
(MRO) in terms of risk for that particular piece of equipment. This means you
should look for an event that is most likely and one in which the overall risk is
determined to be the highest.
Thirdly, consider assessing only one risk dimension – the one with the highest
risk level — to avoid wasting time. As mentioned earlier, looking at each event
individually usually ends up being a waste of time, as many directly affect the
others. Often, it's fairly obvious which risk dimension comes with the highest
level of risk. For example, if you're evaluating the criticality of a pressure relief
valve at a natural gas plant, the risks associated with safety are what you'll be
looking at (including the environmental and community impact). If you're
assessing a component that provides electricity to operate plant equipment,
you'll most likely consider the economic impact of that failing.
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10) having the most impact. For example, if you're scoring the safety, health and
environmental impact risk of an asset, you might define the impact a failure would
have based on the following:
This way of performing and visualizing a criticality analysis should be done in two
phases. The first phase is the initial analysis from a cross-functional team with input
from operations; maintenance; engineering procurement; and environment, health
and safety (EH&S). The second phase is keeping the analysis process evergreen
or maintaining the criticality analysis process throughout the asset's life cycle. This
helps you figure out when risk has been mitigated or if there are any significant
changes with each asset.
Creating a visual for your process of performing a criticality analysis and
determining final criticality ratings can be done in 10 steps:
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Step 1: Choose the characteristics by which you want to evaluate each asset.
These characteristics should cover multiple aspects of the business, such as
the impact on customers, the EH&S impact, the ability to isolate and recover
from single-point failures, preventive maintenance history, corrective
maintenance history, etc.
Step 2: Weigh each characteristic using a scale of 0 to 10 to portray the
significance to the business. You can also use a larger scale (the larger the
scale, the easier it will be to identify critical assets), but the scale shouldn't
exceed 100.
Step 3: Define each characteristic's description on the scale for accuracy.
Step 4: List (or import) your asset hierarchy.
Step 5: Define the main function of each asset to identify a single-point failure.
Step 6: Analyze the effect a single-point failure would have for each asset
across all characteristics.
Step 7: Calculate the criticality rating for each asset by dividing the raw score
(sum of all characteristics) by the total weighted points possible, multiplied by
100.
Step 8: Identify the top 10-20 percent of the critical assets.
Step 9: Review your analysis and find the characteristics that make each asset
critical.
Step 10: Finally, identify the assets that are most significant to important areas
of the business, such as reliability, cost, replacement value, maintenance plan
development, etc.
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everything learned from the FMEA to the FMECA, classifying failure effects by
severity, performing criticality calculations, ranking failure mode criticality and
determining the highest risk items, taking actions to mitigate failure and
documenting the remaining risk, and following up on correction action
effectiveness.
Once you have your criticality ratings, a criticality analysis can help you choose a
proper risk mitigation strategy that you can apply to each asset. For example:
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