A CRITICALITY APPROACH
Are you just getting started with your oil analysis program? Are you experiencing budgetary constraints limiting what you can effectively monitor? Are you finding that your program isn’t capturing enough data on your very critical assets? Or are you being overwhelmed with too much data across too many assets to manage properly. In any of these cases, a one-size-fits-all approach to routine oil analysis doesn’t cut it.
Every operation and facility will have some pieces of equipment that are more important than others. If you’re just starting out or have budgetary constraints, focusing on those critical high value assets first and foremost can make a difference.
A criticality approach to a preventive maintenance program allows you to look at your system as a whole, and be more calculated with budgeting, personnel, and planned downtime. For example, having the same testing schedule implemented across ALL assets, may overwhelm your staffing resources, sap your budget and impact on your bottom line. By adopting a criticality-based condition monitoring program you are able improve maintenance efficiencies and give you the ability to size your program up or down based on available resources including staffing availability.
Rating your equipment
When thinking about how critical an asset is, consider the following factors: importance of asset to the overall operation, safety, likelihood of failure, and the potential cost of a failure.
- How important is your equipment to your overall operation?
- Consider how important the asset is to your overall operation. Does it have any spares if it goes down unexpectedly? If this piece of equipment or component went down, what are the implications from both maintenance costs and production downtime? If this asset is critical to moving products and people, consider this to be a critical asset and assign it a higher level of testing to catch failures sooner.
- How would a failure affect the safety of your staff/public?
- Consider the safety impact this piece of equipment poses if it fails. If the danger to staff/public is high should failure occur, then it’s a critical asset that should be on the list for routine oil analysis.
- How likely is it to fail?
- Consider if this asset is a “bad actor” and is more likely fail due to age, environment etc. If regular testing finds problems of the same type are always coming up (ie water, wear metals, viscosity), it may be work including as a critical asset.
- How costly would a failure be?
- Consider if the cost of repairing a failure is many more times the cost of oil analysis and other forms of preventative maintenance monitoring. Do a simple cost benefit analysis: compare what would it cost total for the failure versus what it would cost to do preventative maintenance annually on that particular asset. The higher the ratio the greater the benefits.
One other item to consider when reviewing your equipment is scheduled maintenance. If an asset is on a strict scheduled maintenance schedule, best practice would be to do a routine oil sample during that time.
Levels of criticality
There are basically four levels of criticality or prioritization you can assign to your assets.
- Extremely high – high dollar losses, high safety risk to the public and staff (risk of death), irreversible damages to the environment.
- High – high dollar loss, high safety risk to public and staff (permanent disability), damage to the environment (reversible).
- Medium – could result in minor injury/ safety threats that result in lost days of work, low losses, minimal environmental impact with restoration efforts.
- Low – could result in minor injury/ safety threats, minimal environmental impact, minimal losses.
However you decide to rate your criticality, myLab has a tool to capture it. Within the “Component” view and under the “General” tab, you can set the criticality level of your assets. You can then pull this information when downloading equipment lists to better organize your fleet/plant assets for routine sampling based on criticality.
Regularly Review Criticality Assessments
By implementing an oil analysis program based on criticality, you can optimize your maintenance efforts, reduce unexpected failures, extend equipment life, and maximize the overall reliability of your operation.
Prioritization of the criticality of your assets needs to constantly be updated and thought about. It is not a system that can be set in stone once for any one site. Especially in today’s world of ever changing economic and supply chain issues, if repair parts have a 50 week lead time and this asset is high priority, ensuring zero down time through routine oil analysis and condition based maintenance is essential.
Talk to us today about prioritizing your assets based on criticality.