Reliability Services

Criticality and Maintenance Strategies

Increase Reliability and Operational Excellence

Too often, we find that maintenance tasks are carried out too frequently, leading to premature failures and not effectively addressing the actual issues that are decreasing reliability. Our approach is to help you understand the criticality of your assets, enabling you to actually manage your assets based on risk rather than opinion. We help you develop effective maintenance strategies that are aligned with the criticality of the assets and their failure modes, establishing the appropriate balance of planned, predictive, and condition-based maintenance approaches. This in turn will attribute to minimized downtime, optimized expenditure, and increased safety.

What are Criticality and Maintenance Strategies and why are they important?

Criticality and Maintenance Strategies are pivotal components of effective asset management, essential for maximizing operational efficiency, minimizing downtime, and optimizing resource allocation.

Criticality: A Criticality Assessment involves evaluating assets based on their impact on production, safety, and environmental concerns. By identifying critical assets, organizations can prioritize maintenance efforts and allocate resources effectively to minimize risks and disruptions.
Maintenance Strategies: Maintenance strategies encompass a range of approaches, from preventive and predictive maintenance to corrective. These strategies are tailored to the specific needs of each asset, ensuring optimal performance and longevity while minimizing costs.

How are Criticality and Maintenance Strategies developed?

Our experienced team of reliability engineers collaborates closely with your organization to complete an equipment criticality assessment (ECA) and develop maintenance strategies through the following steps:

Data Collection and Analysis: We gather and analyze your asset data, including the asset register, failure history, maintenance history, current PM schedules, operational data, and other relevant data and documentation.
Equipment Criticality Assessment: We conduct an ECA either leveraging your existing criticality assessment process and criteria or collaborate with you in the development of a criticality standard and risk matrix. By leveraging your asset data and our analysis, we pre-assign criticality rankings before facilitating a review workshop with your team to agree and finalize.
Maintenance Strategy Development and Optimization: Establishing the most appropriate maintenance strategy depends on factors including asset criticality, operating environment, resource constraints, and organizational objectives. We follow a systematic approach, leveraging reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), API 691, and FMECA-based templates, to develop maintenance strategies that are aligned to the criticality and address failure modes. These strategies will encompass various approaches, including:
• Run to Failure
• Planned Maintenance
• Predictive Maintenance (PdM)
• Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM)
• Operator Rounds
• Re-design Initiatives
Implementation: Our team assists you in implementing the maintenance strategies into your Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), identifying and implementing the appropriate monitoring technology for CBM and PdM tasks, establishing key performance indicators (KPIs), implementing maintenance and inspection schedules, integrating advanced monitoring technologies, and training your personnel on reliability best practices.

Benefits of Criticality and Maintenance Strategies

Investing in Criticality and Maintenance Strategies offers a multitude of benefits for organizations seeking to increase their asset’s reliability:

Reduced Downtime:
Conducting the right maintenance activity at the right time helps mitigate failures, minimizing unexpected equipment breakdowns and downtime. This ensures that operations continue smoothly.
Prioritized Resourcing:
Criticality assessment guides resource allocation, ensuring that resources are allocated where they are needed most to maximize asset reliability and performance.
Enhanced Safety and Compliance:
Proactive maintenance strategies mitigate risks associated with equipment failures, enhancing workplace safety and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Cost Savings:
Optimized maintenance strategies result in cost savings through reduced downtime, optimized maintenance expenses, and extended asset lifespan, leading to improved profitability and competitiveness.

Take a proactive approach to asset reliability with our expertise by your side. Contact us today to learn more about how our Criticality and Maintenance Strategy Development service can transform your asset integrity and reliability.