A CMMS holding 1,000 assets and hundreds of preventive maintenance tasks presents a familiar problem: no team can optimize everything at once. The work needs a rational starting point, especially in facilities where staffing is limited and maintenance personnel juggle multiple responsibilities.
Identify the Assets That Matter Most
Steve Janow, Senior Reliability Consultant at MVP One, explains in “MVP 306: PM Development and Optimization” that maintenance teams should begin by identifying which assets create the greatest risk to the business when they fail.
"You want to start with the most important stuff," Janow said. "Which ones are going to take the company or plant down? Which ones are going to hurt our production?"
This principle matters most for organizations with aging equipment, lean maintenance teams, or large asset populations. Janow says that asset criticality establishes an objective framework for deciding where to focus on preventive maintenance development, PM reviews, inventory optimization, and reliability improvements.
Teams should concentrate first on the assets carrying the highest operational consequences rather than spreading resources evenly across all equipment.
Look Beyond Downtime
A criticality assessment considers far more than downtime. Janow explained that maintenance professionals must evaluate how equipment failures affect the entire operation, not just production output. A filler, ammonia compressor, switchgear panel, wastewater pump, and case packer may be critical for different reasons.
Safety sits at the center of any evaluation since failure can injure an employee, expose someone to hazardous energy, or create a fire risk. Environmental consequences matter, as well. Product quality concerns arise when a failure contaminates product or compromises packaging integrity. Production impact covers a stopped line, a bottleneck, or reduced throughput.
Financial impact rounds out the assessment, capturing costs from emergency labor, expedited part shipments, product disposal, or extended downtime. These categories mirror the principles used in reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) programs, which evaluate failures based on operational consequences.
Put Rankings to Work
Once assets carry a ranking, the maintenance team can focus on PM optimization where it delivers the greatest return. That might mean reviewing vibration routes on a critical gearbox, refining inspection tasks on a production bottleneck, or developing condition-monitoring practices for a high-risk compressor before rewriting a routine inspection for a nonessential exhaust fan.
Criticality rankings also help maintenance departments make defensible decisions when resources run thin. One training participant described operating with a severely understaffed maintenance team while trying to improve compliance metrics and manage competing priorities. Janow stressed that criticality provides a structured way to determine what deserves attention first.
Without a documented criticality model, every overdue PM, repair, or work request can appear equally urgent. With one in place, planners, supervisors and technicians can explain why a bearing inspection on a production bottleneck takes precedence over a cosmetic repair, or why reliability resources should target a small group of high-consequence assets first.
Asset criticality provides the roadmap for PM development and optimization. Before frequencies change, tasks get rewritten or predictive technologies get deployed, maintenance teams need to answer one question: what equipment failure would hurt the business most? According to Janow, that is where the optimization journey begins.
Register for MVP 306: PM Development and Optimization here
