Spending Maintenance Dollars Wisely by Assessing Equipment Criticality

Equipment criticality assessments can ensure limited maintenance dollars are used in the most effective way. A criticality assessment provides the means for quantifying and rating how important each piece of equipment is to determine its value to the overall facility and its production. It can be a key element to reducing costs and improving quality. Traditionally, the process of ranking has been difficult at best because there are any number of tools and methods for criticality ranking. At some organizations, assessment tools and methodologies even vary from site to site..

One Standard Assessment Tool
Based on years of experience and observations at hundreds of client sites, Predictive Service has developed a standard evaluation tool that is easy to use and provides evaluation consistency at one or hundreds of locations. It can be used by a facility's subject matter experts (SMEs) to score the equipment based upon three primary factors: equipment score, its maintenance cost, and its reliability/bad actor score. These three scores are added together to determine the overall effect of the equipment to the facility.

The Benefits of a Criticality Assessment:

• Production, Utilization, Quality, Environmental, Health & Safety, impact (Equipment Score)
• Annual cost of preventative and corrective maintenance (Cost Score)
• Combined Production and Reliability impact (Combined Score)

The equipment score considers utilization, production value, quality, safety and environmental effects, and is a score that indicates overall effect on throughput. The cost score is the effect on the maintenance budget as it pertains to preventative and corrective maintenance activities per piece of equipment. The reliability score assesses the equipment mean time between failure (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), to show the effect of this equipment on reliable operation and to drive out bad actors.

Sort by Score
The tool is designed to allow the user flexibility in sorting equipment ranking based on:

• Production, Utilization, Quality, Environmental, Health & Safety, impact (Equipment Score)
• Annual cost of preventative and corrective maintenance (Cost Score)
• Combined Production and Reliability impact (Combined Score)

The ability to sort and filter based on three different scores is invaluable in understanding the overall impact of specific equipment to the production and maintenance operations. It also guides facilities through making improved business decisions.

Contact your Predictive Service sales representative for more information or for a copy of the software. Predictive Service can help facilitate the process, but it is best for the actual scoring to be done by subject matter experts for each piece of equipment.

Article Shows How predictive maintenance Integration Yields Significant Energy Savings

All facilities lose energy dollars. The losses could be through overheated electrical distribution systems, overloaded and misaligned rotating assets, or through expensive compressed air and steam leaks through pipes and fittings. Couple these losses with the increasing pressures of global competition, thinning workforces and budget constraints, and it becomes ever more important to fully leverage predictive maintenance technologies to improve equipment reliability.

How will you get creative to save money and add back to the bottom line or protect whatever reliability team is still standing? This is difficult since many facility maintenance departments are care takers of older equipment and systems that were not designed for energy conservation.

Predictive Service Corporate Development Manager Dale Smith recently had a paper published on ReliablePlant.com that addressed these issues and showed how the successful integration of standard predictive maintenance technologies could capture significant energy savings and simplify ROI calculations. And, provide increased safety, reliability and enhanced facility capacity.

Click here for a complete copy of Dale's full article on predictive maintenance integration.

Dale also recently wrote a paper titled "predictive maintenance Integration for Electrical Distribution Safety and Reliability." He will be presenting the paper at several upcoming conferences, including:

• Safety 2009 Conference
• Reliable Plant Conference
• World Energy & Engineering Congress

His paper and presentation address the problem of electrical systems that can expose employees to life-threatening hazards because of infrastructure changes that happen over time, facility expansions, load requirement increases and equipment degradation due to age and lack of maintenance. Often, there is no indication of a potential problem until a fault occurs and the overcurrent protective device fails to operate, resulting in injury or damage to equipment and property. Safety, maintenance and reliability professionals can proactively change this scenario and enhance these protections and the sustainability of their electrical systems by deploying an integrated condition monitoring strategy with predictive maintenance technologies.

Predictive Service Recognized as One of Northeast Ohio's Top-Performing Companies

Predictive Service has received another top regional business award, being named a 2009 NEO Success Award winner. The award recognized Predictive Service for its growth in both revenue and number of employees over the past three years.

"It is great to be recognized as one of the top performing companies in our region, which further validates our approach. If you provide a needed service in a unique, professional manner, then the marketplace will be the ultimate judge of your success," said Predictive Service President and CEO Don Frankel.

The NEO Success Awards program was established in 1995 as a way to showcase the success of business in the Northeast Ohio region and to recognize the top-performing companies. Predictive Service was also recently named to Weatherhead 100 and to the Inc. 5000 for the second year in a row.

Upcoming Trade Show Appearances

NFPA, Jun 8-10, Chicago, IL. Booth 139.

BOMA, June 28-30, Philadelphia, PA. Booth 640.

SMRP, Oct 19-22, St Louis, MO. Booth 85.

IMC-PDM 2009, Nov 16-18, Daytona Beach, FL. Booth 316.