Most plants I work with have their critical assets covered. Sensors on the compressors, eyes on the chillers, contract maintenance showing up like clockwork. And on paper, that looks like a solid monitoring program.
The problem is what’s happening everywhere else.
The assets that don’t carry a top-tier criticality rating (the production pumps, the secondary drives, the equipment nobody loses sleep over) often run completely unwatched. And in my experience, those are exactly the assets generating the most unplanned downtime.
The Flaw in the Criticality-first Instinct
It’s easy to see how this happens. Resources are limited, so you prioritize where the exposure seems highest. You focus on the assets that would shut down the whole facility if they failed, which makes intuitive sense.
But here’s the flaw: your most critical assets are usually the ones you maintain most. They’re on heavy contract maintenance, PMed regularly, and inspected constantly precisely because everyone knows how bad a failure would be. In practice, they tend to fail the least.
Meanwhile, the assets nobody’s watching quietly rack up failures. I had a customer who monitored exclusively utilities for this reason. Their compressors and chillers were all rated A in criticality, and the monitoring program reflected that. But those assets were touched so frequently and maintained so heavily that they saw almost no failures over a multi-year period.
Their production assets, lower criticality rating, lighter maintenance, and lack of monitoring failed multiple times within the same window. That’s what was actually driving their downtime costs. The criticality matrix told one story. The data told another.
Coverage Has Its Own Trap
The instinct on the other end, just monitor everything, runs into a different wall. If your team can only action 50 alerts a week and you’re monitoring 500 assets, you’ve created alarm fatigue. The important signals get buried under the noise, and your team spends its time chasing alerts that don’t lead anywhere meaningful.
More monitoring isn’t the answer on its own. More structured monitoring is.
What Actually Works
The framework I use with customers is called the coverage-to-criticality ladder. The idea is simple: start broad enough to understand your real risk profile, then use the data to surface which assets actually behave critically, not which ones your criticality matrix says should.
That distinction matters more than most teams expect. Criticality isn’t static. An asset’s risk profile changes based on how often it runs, how it’s being maintained, and what the data is showing over time. A program that revisits those assumptions is how predictive maintenance programs actually deliver on their promise.
I walk through the full framework, including what to look for at each rung of the ladder, in the first episode of Five Minute Maintenance below.
Watch Episode 1 of Five Minute Maintenance to Learn More
Five Minute Maintenance is a monthly series where the Augury team breaks down the concepts and frameworks that help reliability and maintenance teams run smarter programs. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.
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