Asset Criticality Assessment: Optimizing Maintenance for Reliability

What is an Asset Criticality Assessment?

An Asset Criticality Assessment (ACA) is the process of evaluating and prioritizing the assets that matter most to an organization in terms of operational impact, reliability, and financial success. It determines an asset’s criticality by weighing potential risks and their impact on the company, helping the organization allocate and prioritize resources effectively.

Importance

An organization that is streamlined and efficient gets results through proper asset management, and a key part of that management is ACA. Without criticality analysis, you wouldn’t clearly understand the importance of each asset, which means you’d be unprepared for the impact if a critical asset fails. Asset reliability and asset tracking are critical for most companies, and when done poorly, both can lead to huge losses.. That’s why an ACA helps you focus your efforts where they matter most, instead of spreading your company too thin.

While every asset plays a role, some are far more critical than others. That’s where understanding an asset’s criticality comes in. You need to identify at least the top 20% of your most critical assets and manage them carefully. To do that effectively, you need a cross-functional view of your teams and how each one assesses the assets they rely on in their workflows.

Role in Asset Management

When it comes to asset management, an ACA not only saves you time and money by proper asset utilization, but also helps you refine your maintenance plans and strategies for each asset. Maybe you were using one blanket strategy for all your assets, but realize it’s not the most efficient approach for your top 20%. Different assets need different strategies to perform at their best.

An asset inspection or analysis can also support other management goals, like meeting environmental targets by identifying the risks each asset poses to the environment. ACA can even recommend new tools or upgrades to outdated systems for a more streamlined operation. It also helps ensure your assets comply with workplace safety standards and government regulations.

An ACA also improves long-term spending decisions by encouraging you to consider the full asset lifecycle, from purchase to maintenance. If an asset isn’t necessary, you can cut costs before they even start. A criticality assessment helps you spot potential risks early, improving how and where you invest, and ultimately boosting your return on investment.

How to Conduct an Asset Criticality Assessment

Conducting an ACA isn’t a quick task. These assessments need to be thorough—and done regularly—to get the best results. From identifying your assets to evaluating the potential consequences of failure, ACAs require serious effort and solid teamwork across departments.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to conduct an ACA :

1. Gather Data

Start by collecting detailed information on all your assets like identifying whether an asset is a single point of failure—meaning if it goes down, it takes the whole system with it. Work closely with your teams to get a full picture of the risks involved. Using a digital checklist or an asset criticality assessment template can really speed things up, allowing for more time to perform more essential tasks.

2. Evaluate the Risk of Failure

Use tools like a risk matrix(Likelihood × Impact) or a Risk Priority Number (RPN = Severity × Occurrence × Detection) to score each asset’s risk level. Talk with each department to get a better understanding of how likely failure is and what kind of impact it could have on the whole process.

3. Aggregate the Criticalness

Assign each asset an Asset Criticality Rating (ACR) from 0–10 based on how critical it is to your business. A weighted scoring model helps you break things into tiers of criticalness, taking into account everything from operational impact to environmental consequences. This scoring also helps prioritize tasks and assessments in times of need or limited resources.

4. Plan Maintenance Strategies

This is where prevention comes in. Create preventive maintenance plans based on your assets’ conditions and utilize the right equipment and strategies to ensure their longevity and health—think vibration sensors for early warnings, a failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), or just coordinating a weekly maintenance routine. The goal is to stay ahead of issues before they escalate.

How Technology Can Streamline Criticality Assessments

Managing all this data can be a lot—but that’s where technology steps in. Tools like Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) help make ACAs much more manageable. A CMMS stores all your asset data, logs, history, and more in one centralized system, eliminating the chaos of lost paperwork and disorganized files. You can also use it to schedule tasks, track spare parts, log costs, and compare spending over time to see if your strategies are actually working.

Big businesses—especially in food service, like Sodexo—have a lot to manage. With 430,000 employees across 45 countries serving 80 million people daily, maintaining quality and consistency is no small task. But with the help of SafetyCulture, Sodexo streamlined operations by simplifying workflows, enabling teams to share data across regions without being on-site. Sensors to monitor oven and fridge temperatures, along with  tools for managing customer feedback, international menus, and staff training can all be found in one place. In such a fast-paced industry, digital solutions like SafetyCulture can help take major stressors off the plate.

In the construction industry, Woodsglass—a company that designs, manufactures, and installs custom-engineered building envelopes—used to deal with abrupt resource allocation. CEO Graham Berry said they felt like “firefighters,” constantly putting out problems and spreading themselves too thin. Realizing their system wasn’t working, they turned to SafetyCulture—and everything changed. With improved quality inspections, contractors and Quality Assurance (QA) teams could leave comments before products left the factory, reducing manufacturing issues. They also started tracking assets using QR codes, preventing loss and theft. With SafetyCulture, they now track over 1,100 assets, saving significant time and money through better operations.