I can’t believe fall is here.  Football is on TV, The Bucksnort Nation (my fantasy football team) is off to an incredible start, and all my favorite outdoor activities are now in season! Life is so good.

This is also the time of year I sit down with my wife and start scheduling all the holiday activities we are planning.  During one of these conversations this weekend, my ADHD brain took over. This is my best recollection of the conversation. 

• When she talked about Christmas, I immediately (& naturally) thought about cookies.  

• Then I thought about how I always eat too many and I promised myself (in that moment) that I won’t get miserable this year.  

• Then I realized I may have already put on a few extra pounds and I need to hit the gym.

• While at the gym, I listened to a podcast and walked on the treadmill. 

• The podcast I listened to is talked about machines on Mars.

• I started to think about reliability & wondered how they would do maintenance on mars.

• I started thinking about how I would design a Maintenance and Reliability program for someone on Mars.

• And then I realized…  THIS IS A GREAT TOPIC FOR A BLOG POST.  So here are… If you’re wondering… this is normal, and yes, my wife is a saint.

Now, Let’s talk about Asset Health and how we teach people to manage it quickly and effectively.

The Asset Health Board

An Asset Health Check is a quick, structured gut-check on whether an asset, and everything built to support it, is actually set up to be maintained.  It's not a teardown or a root cause investigation. Think of it as a pre-flight checklist that ensures everything is in place so that when this thing needs work, nobody's scrambling to figure out what it is, how to fix it, or whether the parts even exist?  

The Methodology

Before you check anything else, you need to know how much this asset matters to protecting your people, environment, production and reputation. That's what your risk matrix is for.  Just plot likelihood against consequence and you get a heat map that sorts everything into a criticality tier. A pump that's cheap to replace and barely dents production doesn't deserve the same attention as the compressor that shuts the whole unit down if it trips.

A typical 5x5 looks like this, color-coded from green (low) up through yellow, orange, and red (critical):

That score becomes the asset's ABC indicator: A being Critical, down to D being Low. That tier is what sets the bar for everything else on the health check.

Step 2: Check the Record Against Its Criticality Tier

Once you know where an asset sits criticality wise, you check the same 7 things every time & prioritize work to reflect the criticality score. Remember, not all assets are created equally, so we adjust minimum expectations around how complete they need to be, and how fast they get worked when something breaks, to scale with criticality:

Walking through what that means for each asset:

• Is the equipment record complete? Nameplate data -make, model, serial number, catalog profile. This is what drives our maintenance programs

• Does it have a maintenance plan? Something that drives routine PMs, scored against the completion target for its tier.

• How many Maintenance Plans is this equipment tied to?  How does that compare to other like equipment with the same make and model?

• Does that plan have a real task list? People, parts, and tools spelled out — not just "perform PM" with no idea what that takes. Same tiered target.

• Does the Task List contain parts?  This is the game changer for procurement and supply chain teams & where you save so much money on parts!

• Is there a BOM? A-through-D assets need one covering everything required to repair and maintain the asset, not just the next scheduled PM. 

• Are the Critical spares & high turn parts in inventory? If this thing fails tomorrow, are the parts on the shelf, or are you waiting on a six-week lead time?

That’s it.  Now imagine a world where you can quickly identify and address poor data quality and missing maintenance plans and task lists.  This is the golden ticket, my friend.  

Why It Matters

Remember those extra holiday pounds? Your storeroom has them too. When nobody trusts the equipment record, the task lists, or the BOMs, people compensate the only way they can. They order extra “just in case” & often times order them again because they forgot where they put the extras.  

Even worse, duplicate parts under three different descriptions, spares for equipment that was retired years ago, and piles of stock for low-criticality assets that could have waited a week. That’s dead weight. Piles of cash sitting on a shelf, taking up space, and aging out.

The Asset Health Check is where you finally hold your organization accountable. It pinpoints what to focus on and drives the biggest wins for your organization.  Once you start managing by exception instead of looking at everything all at once, you won’t believe how fast the wins start adding up! The payoff is the right people, with the right parts and the right tools, at the right place, at the right time.  Reduced unplanned downtime, a leaner storeroom, faster repairs, and fewer surprises.  

Lao Tzu once said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  Let’s figure out which one to take first.