Risk & Criticality in Uptime

Terry Nelson has an article, just published in Uptime Magazine, that does a great job of explaining the difference between Risk, Criticality, and a management strategy.



You can find the article here: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/reliabilityweb/uptime_20111011/#/58



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Prioritizing Work & Gas Line Explosion in San Bruno

NPR did an interesting story below:







Interestingly the story notes that PG&E, the gas line operator, identified the pipeline as critical and in need of repair and even got a rate increase approved for the work. However, they never completed the repairs because of "re-prioritizing" the work. As the neighbors interviewed mention, the public doesn't know what is buried near them, however, it makes us, the utility operators look very bad when we prioritize work and then don't complete the work.

I like to use a risk matrix to look at any backlog of work and always focus on doing the work that is most critical first, whether that is daily PM/CM work or capital investments.

Criticality and Deep Water Oil Drilling

I just watched a video presentation of by Shell Oil executives discussing deep water oil well design, failure modes, and criticality of the components of the design. Very interesting for an engineering presentation and, while it doesn't really apply to our industry, it is very instructive on how the Oil and Gas are handling criticality issues in their design and operations.

Sustainability in Gresham OR includes Asset Management

In the March/April 2009 issue of UIM, James Rush wrote a nice article on the Gresham and Veolia Water Public Private partnership and how it has been a key component of the City's move toward sustainability.

The article nicely highlights the significance of the criticality review as the a central element of the asset management program. You can read the whole article here: http://www.uimonline.com/index/webapp-stories-action?id=251&archive=yes&Issue=2009-04-01

Relative Criticality Presentation 2007

In the fall of 2007, I presented a paper at the Annual Pacific Northwest Clean Water Association (PNCWA) annual conference. The presentation was recorded and it has been posted to YouTube.com in 4 parts, listed below.

This presentation includes introductory concepts for Asset Management, functional hierarchy strategies, as well as, discussion of the approach and case study of Relative Criticality approach. Hope this is helpful.

If you want a short overview of this four (4) part series start here: http://www.waterandwastewater.com/videos/view_video.php?viewkey=538c593fbdabb0c5ef2c



See all four segments below:

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.

Training Link - Selecting a Hierarchy Strategy

This training link is a video interview with Terry Nelson, of inspiraworks.com. During the EPA 2-Day seminar (Tom's Bad Day) there is a recommendation to organize assets into some kind of hierarchy and they give examples of hierarchy by location or equipment type or accounting group. As early as 1992, Terry developed a hierarchy based on function or systems and in this video he discusses some of the details and the benefits of this approach.

My favorite quote from this discussion is:

Asset management, oddly and perhaps ironically, is actually system and function management, Terry Nelson February 2008.