Criticality analysis is critical

How do you decide which assets should be monitored? How do you decide whether you can justify the use of more than one technology? Criticality analysis provides a means to prioritize which assets will be monitored and how much effort will be put into collecting data and performing the analysis.

Criticality analysis considers several factors. It will consider the consequences of failure, for example, health and safety, harm to the environment, downtime and production losses, availability of spares, cost of spares, etc. It will also consider the reliability of the asset: how likely it is to develop a fault condition. And it should also consider the detectability of the fault conditions. Therefore, an unreliable asset where failure would lead to dire consequences and where we currently cannot detect the onset of failure absolutely requires condition monitoring and can justify multiple technologies. At the other extreme, a reliable asset’s minimal consequences of failure may not require any condition monitoring; we may employ “run to failure”.

Criticality analysis enables you to make the best use of your limited resources.