Plants rely on a wide variety of assets. Some are mission-critical, i.e., required for production, safety or environmental compliance, while others handle non-crucial functions. This difference in criticality affords an opportunity to prioritize maintenance strategy and optimize maintenance costs.
Thus, many manufacturers perform asset criticality ranking (ACR) or equipment criticality ranking (ECR) and often mark the criticality class in the equipment master of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. However, most organizations carry out this exercise as a sort of mechanical drill and don’t give it proper importance, time and effort. No wonder such companies fail to leverage the exercise to formulate maintenance strategies based on equipment criticality.
ACR involves ranking assets based on a well-structured procedure. An asset gets marks for various parameters, with the consolidated score leading to its classification into a criticality category. Usually, for simplicity, the ranking consists only of A, B and C categories.
To learn more, read "Make Better Maintenance Decisions" from Chemical Processing.