It’s widely agreed that equipment criticality ratings (ECR), also sometimes known as machine criticality ratings (MCR), are an important part of designing and setting manufacturing maintenance priorities.
We asked our National Service Manager why ECR is so critical to your plant, and how it can help reduce and prevent downtime.
Q. What is equipment criticality rating (ECR)?
A. It’s really just a form of risk assessment, which evaluates the consequence and likelihood of failure of a specific item within a larger system, such as a manufacturing line. Highly critical machines are those that production depends on most. If these go down, production stops or bottlenecks occur.
An example of a ‘consequence of failure’ scale (Source: ReliablePlant)
Source: Prometheus Group.
Q. What should I do once I find the ECR?
A. Once you know which machines and associated equipment and parts are most critical, you need to feed that information back into plant design, prevention, and response procedures. Make sure you:
Q. What do manufacturers do well?
A. Most manufacturers have sound manufacturing maintenance regimes and they already understand their equipment criticality on an intuitive level. Many also have redundancies built into their processes for when machines fail, meaning they can afford to wait for a service provider to fix the faulty machine.
Q. What can manufacturers improve on?
A. Remember to follow up your ECR (or any risk assessment) with solid prevention and redundancy programs.
Manufacturers should also be aware that criticality ratings can change, depending on, for example, part availability, or suppliers no longer manufacturing the product. Be sure to schedule in time to revise criticality ratings, so you know you’re spending resources in the right areas.
Q. Who’s responsible for ECR?
A. Leaders and managers within the business have to own ECR, because they’re the only ones who fully understand the impact that equipment failure has on their production and profitability.
Sometimes channel managers and automation service providers who are in tune with risk will start driving the conversation down the path of determining the ECR; however, the ultimate responsibility still lies with the business.
ECR is key to any sound manufacturing maintenance regime
ECR is one of many proactive and preventative measures that helps production managers prioritise their resources and drive improvements. To learn more about how we’ve worked with businesses to drive improvements, see our work with Coopers.
When a machine stops, it can quickly escalate to calling in external help – sometimes unnecessarily. The Breakdown Checklist is designed to get you back online faster. It will get your team thinking about what caused the breakdown and assess the need for external advice. Download the free downtime checklist here.
SAGE Automation delivers agile, scalable and secure solutions that don’t just solve current problems, they preempt and deter future ones, helping your organisation thrive. With years of experience working in defence, infrastructure, resources, utilities and manufacturing we have the expertise you need to custom-build or perform manufacturing maintenance on your equipment for maximum ROI.