Explaining Asset Risk & Criticality

When managing a plant with various assets such as equipment or functional locations, many of those assets will eventually fail to function as they once did. While it may make sense to perform maintenance on all assets in a plant, various factors play into whether an asset should or should not have maintenance performed on it. These include factors such as the probability that failure could happen, the negative consequence of the failure happening, how expensive it is to just simply replace the asset, and so on. The way to determine which assets require what levels of maintenance are determined via Risk & Criticality Assessments within SAP Asset Performance Management.

Risk & Criticality Assessments are a standard part of the preventative maintenance procedure that plants follow. They serve as the baseline for whether other asset strategy assessments are needed. Performing preventative maintenance on all assets in a plant would be costly, timely, and unnecessary endeavor for a maintenance technician to manage and map out.

The main process on how a user would perform a risk and criticality assessment is as follows:

• The assessment is created.
• One or more technical objects (assets) are assigned to the assessment.
• A Risk & Criticality Assessment Template is assigned to each technical object used in the assessment.
  • The template provides the overall structure of how the asset it is assigned to will be assessed (more details later).
• For each technical object, the risk score is calculated depending on how you answer the questions provided by the assigned assessment template.
• Depending on the risk score, a criticality code and a recommended action are assigned.

These criticality codes that are assigned to the technical object in SAP Asset Performance Management will also reflect over in the backend SAP S/4HANA system after the two sync with one another. The criticality codes that a technical object receives from a Risk & Criticality Assessment will also reflect when viewing it in other areas of SAP Asset Performance Management.

The way that Risk & Criticality Assessments are configured is that rather than making a standalone assessment by itself, it requires a template to be assigned to the technical object being assessed. Risk and Criticality Assessment Templates allow users to structure the format of their assessment and what content will be within them. Here are some of the items that can be used in an assessment template.

• Impacts (grouping of questions by predefined categories).
• Dimensions (the individual questions asked for the assessment).
• Scales (the list of available answers for each question as well as the risk value assigned to said answer).
• Financial Risk (monetary loss from failure for each impact).
• Thresholds (what criticality and associated action is assigned to the calculated risk score).

The benefit of having individual assessment templates rather than just building all these aspects within an assessment itself is the reusability that a template provides. As an example, a user could create a template that is specifically made for determining the risk of motor failure, with all aspects of the template tailored to motors. That template can be reused anytime a Risk & Criticality assessment needs to be performed on another motor within their system.