Fix It or Replace It? A Risk-Based Approach, Pervaiz Anwar and Pam Koester

As many of us have discovered, asset management of a typical wastewater plant with hundreds, if not thousands, of assets on your asset inventory can very quickly become overwhelming. We have limited staff and budgets and so there is always a prioritization of where to spend your limited resources. Where do you send your staff? Regarding capital investment, where should you invest next to make sure your plant is reliable and meets your capacity demands? These are the key questions facing managers across the spectrum of public works.

What we need is a methodology to rank and prioritize. A couple of years ago, I came across an article that explores one organizations approach to prioritizing where to do a detailed condition assessment. The authors introduced the need for some kind of "filtering" with the following quote:

"To save time and money, the project team began by evaluating
various modes and consequences of equipment failures
and ranking how critical each asset is (to avoid making detailed
assessments of noncritical equipment). The team's results
showed that this risk-based approach could substantially reduce
asset life-cycle costs."

Please read the entire article here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=we%26t%20pervaiz%20anwar&source=web&cd=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDsQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wef.org%2FWorkArea%2Flinkit.aspx%3FLinkIdentifier%3Did%26ItemID%3D5351&ei=T4rCTrm1HeOIiALHgqnTCw&usg=AFQjCNEBbvGa7W2uPl_LYq4dBKkwT6g8nA&cad=rja

In my experience, working through a formalized criticality process is so key to your entire asset management program that I recommend working through the process as you prepare your data to go into your CMMS. With a criticality ranking in your CMMS, your daily planning becomes so much easier to prioritize. You can now prioritize to keep your most critical and high risk systems up and running. If you have taken your criticality process through a thorough documentation approach and have obtained agreement on the priorities, there is little doubt on where the focus of the maintenance team should be.

When the time comes for prioritizing your capital plan, the criticality ranking will again focus limited dollars where the customers will see the most benefit.