A Critical Equipment Approach to Sustainability in Maintenance Management

Your company has hundreds of pieces of equipment for which you are responsible for maintenance. And what is expected of you is to minimize unexpected downtime…

You can only meet this expectation by ensuring that maintenance processes are managed correctly.

In most businesses, maintenance process management begins with the creation of maintenance plans. A plan is developed based on the equipment list, and maintenance activities are assigned to each piece of equipment, assuming that each piece of equipment contributes to production or has an equal impact.

While this initial step may seem logical at first glance, the workload it brings becomes unmanageable in the medium to long term. Ultimately, monthly reports show low planned maintenance completion rates, technicians who don't believe in the system and resist its implementation, and requests to expand the team.

Unfortunately, you can see similar situations in processes such as spare parts management and preventive maintenance.

The most appropriate approach to avoid this problem is to thoroughly understand/define the equipment, accurately assess the organization's capacity to perform tasks, and shape work plans accordingly.

So how should it be implemented?

Not all equipment is created equal.

Take a walk around the production area. You'll see two categories of equipment, even if they haven't been officially labeled.

First: Equipment that malfunctions in a way that halts production, triggers a workplace safety incident, creates a compliance issue, or requires you to report a failure to upper management before the end of the shift.

Secondly: Everything else.

Most maintenance programs blur the line between these two categories. Planned maintenance schedules are created based on intuition, equipment age, or whatever the OEM recommends (which is optimized for the OEM, not your operation).

We rarely see a lack of effort in maintenance teams; the real problem is a lack of focus.

The result is both a very large and misallocated maintenance budget, as well as too much money and attention spent on non-critical equipment.

In addition, very little money and attention is devoted to a few assets that, in the event of a malfunction, can halt production for days.

This flawed perspective doesn't arise from a single bad decision. It accumulates slowly over years of maintenance programs that go unquestioned and spare parts lists that are never rationalized.

These problems necessitate equipment criticality analysis.

7 Key Measures of Criticality

While usability is a primary factor in OEE measurement, this criterion alone will not be sufficient for equipment criticality analysis.

A good criticality analysis should be based on 7 key criteria.

1. Occupational safety impact,

2. Environmental impact,

3. Its impact on quality,

4. Operational impact,

5. Usability,

6. Frequency of failure,

7. Cost

Although some sources recommend using FMEA in criticality analysis, I can say that the application of FMEA is more complex and also insufficient in terms of weighting.

Outcome-Based Maintenance Strategy

A list of critical issues is only useful if it changes your behavior. For managers, this should mean three concrete decisions:

• Maintenance strategy,

• Spare parts management

• Scope of situation monitoring.

Critical assets should have fully developed maintenance strategies based on actual failures, not just recurring OEM periodic maintenance.

They should have specialized spare parts, especially for components with long delivery times.

And they should be part of the condition monitoring program your facility runs.

Semi-critical assets are handled with a lighter approach. For this equipment, periodic maintenance intervals adjusted based on actual failure history, selective spare parts coverage, and ongoing review to determine whether condition monitoring is worth adding as data improves are required.

The definition of "operate until failure (RTF)" for non-critical assets often makes us uneasy. But it shouldn't. Deliberately deciding that a given asset may fail and will be repaired when it does is sound reliability management.

The criticality list will also support your budget management. When someone asks you why you need 2 million TL/$ in maintenance spending next year, you can be sure that the criticality analysis will give you a defensible answer.

Critical assets (Class A): Formal maintenance strategy based on actual failure modes, stockpiled critical spare parts, condition monitoring coverage, documented response plans for potential failure scenarios.

Semi-critical assets (Class B): Optimized PM intervals, selective spare parts, periodic review to include condition monitoring as data improves.

Non-critical assets (Class C): Operate to failure when the outcome is acceptable, shared or on-demand parts, reactive maintenance intentionally defaulted to.

Interdepartmental Requirements

A criticality ranking done solely by maintenance would be less useful than a criticality ranking done in an environment that also includes production, occupational safety, and engineering.

Maintenance knows what makes equipment repair difficult. Production knows what truly impacts productivity. Occupational safety knows which failure modes are significant from a regulatory perspective.

Bringing these perspectives together, even in a half-day meeting, creates a framework that everyone trusts.

Trust is key here. If operations leadership doesn't believe the critical asset list reflects production reality, subsequent maintenance decisions won't receive the support they need.

Outcome and Performance Criteria

I have tried to explain the details of the analysis you will be conducting above.

Building your future strategies based on this outcome will undoubtedly help you establish a more sustainable care system.

It is also very important that this analysis has a living structure. To achieve this, repeating this analysis every year and identifying actions to downgrade high-class equipment should be among your goals.

You can consider the following points among your goals.

• The number of equipment classified as A and B should not exceed 60% of the total number of equipment.

• The number of Class A equipment items should not exceed 30% of the total number of equipment items.

• Inclusion of new equipment in the analysis,

• Action completion rates