Verify data, assign rankings

by Arne Oas

The drive seized. Production stopped. You investigate and find no oil is in the unit. You frantically look in your CMMS to see the last time the unit was serviced and find that it is not listed. . . .

The next major step in using your CMMS effectively is knowing what you’ve got. This is an important and often underlooked step. How can you plan work, service equipment or tell someone what to work on if you don’t know if it’s there? I find that only 1 in 20 companies perform a field verification of CMMS data. Without doing one, how do you know what’s there?

How important is field verification? In a recent engagement I was involved with, field verification was performed on the client’s data. It revealed that overall records had an error rate greater than 95 percent. The cross sample of equipment specifications had wrong or inconsistent data 75 percent of the time. The client was missing more than half its equipment. The location hierarchy structure was wrong in more than 98 percent of the records. And, preventive/predictive (PM/PdM) maintenance data was missing or wrong on 70 percent of the machinery. How could this not impact the operation?

 When performing a field confirmation, verify the equipment specification data and tag each unit. Tagging ensures that all correctly identify equipment for PM and repair. If equipment isn’t tagged, how do you identify which pump is No. 1? At this point, decide if bar-coding equipment can aid tracking work.

If you did the above, you completed a significant step. You now know what you have, who made it and where it’s located. This gives you an accurate database. What’s next? Answer the following: How important is the equipment to your operation? Will the unit shut down an entire process/line, or is it just an annoyance? How fast should your staff respond to a reported problem? Figuring out the criticality of the location or equipment helps you assign reliability requirements and subsequent service.

This should not be a simple 1-2-3 ranking. And, it does not just involve the maintenance department. Operations, safety, environmental and quality all work to determine the importance of any item or location to the overall operation.

One of the best ways to do this is through impact questions. Pick the highest criticality ranking for the plant (say 1,000 points). Give each department a share of that ranking to evaluate the failure impact of the equipment (i.e., production gets 300 points, maintenance 300, safety 150, environmental 150 and quality 100). Then, develop qualifying questions for use in evaluating the equipment. For the production group, one could be “the impact of a stoppage of production.” Depending on the answer, give 100 points for a total, 50 for a partial or zero for none.

Other questions could deal with the duration of the loss, production area involved or time to impact on production. The maximum points possible for each department’s questions should be less than that group’s share of points. Totaling the points from all the groups gives you the equipment’s importance to your overall operation.

To help measure the impact of a failure, I find a functional flow diagram helpful. First, define the system or production line, then show connections (supplies and outputs), all associated equipment and critical instrumentation. The drawing lets you see what happens up/downstream of the failure and rapidly helps identify the impact of an equipment or component failure.

The final criticality ranking is the driving force in determining the order of improvement within your CMMS modules. It determines the priority of development or operation in response times, work planning and scheduling, PM/PdM and bill of material development.

Arne Oas is the senior maintenance consultant at Management Resources Group. If you have a maintenance management software question, contact Coach Oas at , or e-mail . 

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