Maximizing Your Condition Monitoring Investment: Start with a Criticality Assessment

When launching a condition monitoring program, it’s natural to feel pressure to act fast—install sensors, collect data, and start predicting failures. But before you start installing sensors on every asset in your facility, it’s worth asking a crucial question: Which machines actually matter most? Without a clear sense of priority, you risk drowning in data, overspending, and still missing the failures that cause the most damage. 

That’s why the most effective programs begin with a smarter approach. Rather than treating all equipment the same, they start by identifying which assets have the greatest impact on safety, reliability, and performance. A criticality assessment provides that foundation, helping you direct time, budget, and tools where they’ll have the biggest return. 

What Is a Criticality Assessment—And Why Should You Care? 

A criticality assessment is a structured process used to evaluate and rank the importance of each asset in your operation. It considers key factors like safety implications, production impact, maintenance costs, failure frequency, and system redundancy. The goal is to determine which assets are most essential to your plant’s performance and which ones can afford to be monitored less intensively. 

Without this foundational step, it’s easy to fall into the trap of implementing condition monitoring technology blindly. That often leads to an overwhelming volume of data, unclear priorities, and poor return on investment. Worse, you may end up overspending on monitoring low-impact equipment while leaving your most critical assets—those that pose the greatest operational and financial risk—unprotected. A criticality assessment helps you avoid those pitfalls by ensuring your monitoring strategy is focused where it matters most. 

The Goals of a Criticality Assessment 

A criticality assessment provides the clarity needed to build a condition monitoring strategy that’s both effective and efficient. By understanding which machines carry the greatest operational risk, you can ensure your monitoring and maintenance efforts are targeted, justified, and aligned with business objectives. 

Here’s what a well-executed criticality assessment helps you achieve: 

• Identify high-risk assets – Pinpoint equipment whose failure would result in significant safety incidents, production downtime, environmental harm, or costly repairs. 

• Optimize resource allocation – Prioritize maintenance time, personnel, and budget by matching monitoring intensity with asset criticality (e.g., continuous monitoring for high-priority assets, route-based or periodic checks for lower-tier assets). 

• Improve decision-making – Support smarter capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) investments by clearly showing where monitoring technologies will deliver the greatest ROI. 

• Align with business priorities – Ensure your maintenance and reliability strategies support broader goals like uptime, profitability, compliance, and risk mitigation. 

• Reduce unplanned downtime – Proactively address the assets most likely to disrupt operations, improving overall reliability and plant performance. 

By tying your monitoring strategy directly to what matters most in your facility, a criticality assessment becomes a foundational step for driving uptime, extending asset life, and maximizing every dollar spent on condition monitoring. 

What Makes an Asset “Critical”? Key Assessment Criteria 

Not all assets are created equal. A criticality assessment helps you determine which ones truly demand priority attention. To do that, you’ll need to evaluate each asset against a set of clearly defined criteria. These factors paint a complete picture of the operational, financial, and safety risks associated with asset failure. 

Key assessment criteria include: 

• Consequences of failure – What happens if this asset fails? Consider the potential for production loss, safety hazards, or environmental impact. 

• Function and process location – Where does the asset sit within the production flow? Assets that are upstream or part of a bottleneck tend to carry greater operational weight. Assets that are part of a unique production process that can’t be supplemented elsewhere are also critical. 

• Failure history – Review the asset’s past performance. Frequent breakdowns, recurring issues, or a history of unplanned downtime may elevate its criticality. 

• Redundancy and spare availability – If there’s no backup, redundancies within the same line, or spares are hard to source, the impact of failure increases dramatically. 

• Cost and time to repair – The higher the repair cost and lead time, the more critical the asset becomes—especially if it would halt production while waiting for parts or service. 

By scoring assets across these categories, teams can assign a clear level of criticality—typically in tiers or rankings—that informs how each machine should be monitored and maintained. This process helps eliminate guesswork and ensures critical resources are applied where they matter most. 

Best Practices for Conducting a Criticality Assessment 

To get the most value from a criticality assessment, it’s important to approach it as a structured, collaborative process. The goal is objectivity and alignment, ensuring that everyone is working from the same playbook when it comes to prioritizing assets. 

Here are some proven best practices: 

• Start with cross-functional input – Involve key stakeholders from maintenance, operations, reliability, and safety. Each team brings valuable insight into how assets affect production, risk, and resource planning. 

• Review historical data and dependencies – Leverage existing maintenance records, failure trends, and process flow diagrams to understand how assets perform and where they sit in the larger system. 

• Use a standardized scoring matrix – To ensure objectivity and consistency in your criticality assessment, it's essential to evaluate each asset using a standardized scoring matrix. You might use a numerical scale (e.g., 1–5, with 5 indicating highest criticality) or a visual color-coded heat map (e.g., red for high risk, yellow for moderate, green for low). By applying the same framework across all equipment types and departments, you eliminate guesswork and reduce bias. This not only makes the process more transparent and defensible, but also provides a clear, visual way to prioritize investments, plan monitoring strategies, and communicate risk levels to stakeholders. 

• Reassess regularly – Asset criticality isn’t static. As production demands shift, equipment is upgraded, or redundancies are added, your criticality rankings should evolve too. Schedule periodic reviews to keep your strategy aligned with current conditions. 

Following these steps helps ensure that your criticality assessment is not just a one-time checklist, but a decision-making tool that supports long-term reliability, budget planning, and continuous improvement. 

The Role of Human Expertise in Prioritization 

While criticality assessments often rely on structured scoring systems and historical data, human expertise remains essential for making smart, context-aware decisions. Condition monitoring experts bring deep knowledge of both the facility and the broader industry, allowing them to interpret data within the realities of day-to-day operations. They understand the nuances of specific assets—how they behave under certain conditions, how changes in production schedules affect risk, and which variables might not show up in a spreadsheet but still impact criticality. Because business priorities and plant conditions evolve, these experts play a key role in continuously refining asset rankings and keeping the condition monitoring strategy aligned with what matters most. This collaborative approach is critical to maximizing ROI and avoiding blind spots in your maintenance strategy. 

From Insight to Action: How Condition Monitoring and Criticality Tiers Work Together 

A hybrid condition monitoring strategy allows facilities to balance budget, risk, and coverage by aligning monitoring methods with asset criticality. Rather than trying to monitor everything the same way, this tiered approach ensures that the most important equipment receives the most attention, while less critical assets are still managed efficiently. The result is maximum uptime, smarter use of resources, and no data overload. 

To create these tiers, facilities often use a numerical criticality scale where each asset is scored across key criteria like safety impact, production loss, repair cost, and redundancy. Once each asset is scored, it can be categorized into one of three tiers: