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The resources available for machine maintenance and asset management of an organization are limited: money, labor availability and time, for instance.
Therefore, it is necessary to prioritize and concentrate efforts in order to increase machine reliability effectively.
In this sense, criticality is the attribute that demonstrates the importance of a machine within a productive process, that is, how much a given machine is indispensable in the context of an operational system.
Based on asset criticality, it is possible to define the prioritization of maintenance actions, in order to ensure that the production system works as close to its nominal capacity as possible.
There is, of course, a general idea especially among more experienced collaborators of which are the most critical machines within a given production process.
However, professionals from different sectors, with different views and experiences, may disagree on machine criticality ranking.
For example, if the question is directed to a professional part of the maintenance team, the answer is likely to be the equipment whose maintenance is more time consuming and harder to perform or whose maintenance interventions are more frequent.
If the question is asked to the plant operation responsible, the answer may be different: perhaps the production bottleneck machine or the one with greatest production capacity.
The responses from Quality or Health and Safety departments will probably be different as well, and thus, a great variability in the definition process will take place.
Therefore, this “intuition” is usually not sufficient to en sure an objective decision, since the definition of criticality is complex and can involve several variables and departments.
To help with this task, there are more structured methods, such as the ABC method for asset criticality.This method makes use of a machine classification system in terms of severity of failure occurrence. Six criteria are taken into account:
Each of the analyzed machines must be classified in the six criteria mentioned above, according to three levels of impact:
After performing this analysis machine by machine, criterion by criterion (1 to 6), the decision flow chart shall be used:
By this method, the machines will be classified as follows:
In addition to the ABC, there are several other methods of evaluating the criticality of machines, such as GUT matrix, Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA).
These and other methods will be covered in future texts on the blog.
Once the organization has defined which assets are the most critical, it’s time to take action.
A good way to start is by structuring a maintenance plan that involves the different maintenance strategies: corrective (run to failure), preventive and predictive.
Critical machines should be the focus of predictive maintenance because it is intended to identify potential failures, preferently at an early stage, to prevent further damage to the machine.
In this sense, vibration analysis is a highly efficient technique to increase the availability of these vital assets to the production system.
Looking to provide a quality solution for this technique, Dynamox has developed a device, accompanied by Mobile Application and a Web Platform, whose function is to monitor the vibration and temperature of the machinery and its components.
Through the solution you can, via wireless Bluetooth connection, access historical data, perform spectral analysis and know for a fact, the condition and health of your assets.
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