Article | REF: SE4006 V1

Equipment criticality assessment - Metrics and performance indicators

Author: Gilles ZWINGELSTEIN

Publication date: October 10, 2014

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHOR

  • Gilles ZWINGELSTEIN: Engineer from the École nationale supérieure d'électrotechnique, d'électronique, d'informatique et d'hydraulique et des télécommunications de Toulouse (ENSEEIHT) - Doctor-Engineer - Doctor of Science - Retired Associate Professor, Université Paris Est Créteil, France

 INTRODUCTION

This article presents the metrics and performance indicators used in different industrial sectors to assess and/or help reduce the criticality of the consequences of equipment failures.

It is essential that company managers and the bodies responsible for establishing and enforcing regulations have dashboards to monitor the effectiveness of the measures put in place to prevent or minimize the consequences of equipment failure.

The term metric used in this article comes from the Anglicism of the word "metrics" and refers to measurement methods by which the effectiveness of a process or product can be assessed.

The vast majority of these monitoring tools have been defined to quantify and qualify the impact of critical failures on the economic profitability of investments, the safety of goods and people, operational availability, compliance with regulatory constraints for hazardous installations and the environment. Given the proliferation of metrics and performance indicators, it is always difficult for the uninformed user to select the most relevant set of indicators, and this article is intended as a guide.

An in-depth analysis of their definitions enables us to divide their fields of application into two categories: on the one hand, the field of traditional, non-hazardous activities for the legislator, and on the other, the field of hazardous, classified activities.

Two families of performance indicators have been defined for each of these categories.

The first family is designed to evaluate performance calculated from data collected on installations: it provides information on the consequences of upstream management decisions. These performance indicators are called "lagging indicators" in the English-speaking world, and are referred to in this article as "impact indicators".

The second family concerns indicators linked to technical or organizational measures that ultimately help to reduce the criticality of a failure. Referred to as "leading indicators", they will hereafter be called "activity indicators".

The notion of equipment criticality has many, often ambiguous, interpretations; the first part of this section will propose a definition. As failures do not necessarily have the same consequences depending on the sector of activity, a classification of conventional sectors of activity and sectors of activity classified as hazardous will be presented, together with the associated regulations for the latter category. Next, a typology of failures will identify three classes of failure: organizational, human and technical. As organizational and human failures predominate, James Reason's "Swiss cheese" model will be...

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

This article is included in

Safety and risk management

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Equipment criticality assessment