Criticality Analysis: A Powerful Catalyst for Cultural Change

A simple exercise supported by an exceptional tool becomes a powerful catalyst for bridging organizational silos and achieving necessary cultural change.

The first aim of a criticality analysis is to identify your most critical assets and uncover operational risk. Then you can target your resources to the most critical assets posing the highest risk to your operation. When you know what is critical you can make better risk-based decisions that lead to better outcomes for your asset management program.

But there is a bigger opportunity here. We have seen with our clients that this simple exercise, supported by Criticality Analyzer™, consistently delivers benefits that go far beyond just identifying critical assets.

Recently the Director of Asset Management at one of our clients commented that Uberlytics’ criticality analysis has become “a central catalyst in driving cultural change within our organization.” The analysis provided hard technical facts but also cultural benefits with their staff, establishing unanimous agreement across silos on what actually was critical, a renewed understanding of the challenges each silo faced, and a new or refreshed deep understanding on how the facility actually operates, its challenges and limitations, and how it is intended to meet the organizational goals. These elements are central to any serious group whose aim is to build a robust asset management program.

Following the pilot criticality analysis supported by the Criticality Analyzer™ software, this exercise is now their fundamental basis for identifying next steps and will be rolled out across their remaining facilities.

A criticality analysis truly can be a powerful catalyst for cultural change and can function as a quick start for establishing or renewing your asset management program.

Through a functional system criticality analysis, in addition to establishing asset criticality rankings you will also:

  • Articulate and review your organizational mission and facility level of service performance objectives.
  • Establish cross-functional teams and foster collaboration that can extend far beyond the analysis.
  • Achieve agreement and alignment across organizational silos on critical priorities.
  • Clearly identify risk to your business and rationalize your capital budget plan with those areas of risk.
  • Document the decision-making process for future reference and review in line with ISO 55000 requirements.
  • Capture institutional knowledge. (Knowledge transfer from an aging workforce is an urgent need for many of our clients.)
  • Renew alignment of activities and tactical priorities with corporate goals and objectives.
  • Renew understanding of facility performance objectives and challenges.

Additionally, the analysis is rigorous and thorough enough that many clients can move directly to maintenance strategy and PM optimization, risk mitigation and improved asset strategies, skipping more time intensive and costly analyses and exercises.

Through all of these additional benefits a criticality analysis really becomes a powerful catalyst for the kind of cultural change that drives successful asset management.