Leveraging Asset Criticality in Virtual Facility

What is Asset Criticality

Asset criticality is a ranking system that prioritizes your facility's most important assets. By evaluating the impact on operations, safety, and finances, this ranking helps you allocate resources for maintenance and ensure critical functions are protected.

In Virtual Facility (VF), asset criticality can be used to guide operator response to an alarm, ensuring that you are always focused on what is most critical to real-time operations.

Asset Criticality in the VF Platform

In Virtual Facility, an “asset” can be a space (like a research lab), equipment (like an air handler) or a system (like chilled water).  

Asset criticality can be set to one of five thresholds (highest, high, medium, low, lowest) or left unassigned (No criticality). The method for assigning criticality depends on the type of asset.

Determining Asset Criticality for Spaces

Virtual Facility assigns asset criticality for spaces based on the criticality of the space type, adhering to relevant standards like ASHRAE 62.1, FGI, NCES 2006-160, NFPA 99, and ASHRAE 170-2021.

Based on space type criticality, operating rooms (ORs) are typically assigned a default asset criticality of Highest, while exam rooms are assigned a Medium criticality.

Default space type criticality settings can be overridden by Virtual Facility staff, if required. Speak with your CS representative or submit a ticket for support.

Default space criticality settings can be overridden by manual adjustment by Admins, if required. See the directions listed in the next subsection of this article.

Example Space Type Criticality based on Reference Standard

Determining Asset Criticality for Equipment and System

Performing an asset criticality analysis (ACA) translates abstract risks into actionable data. By integrating ACA data with Virtual Facility, you can leverage this criticality information in real-time to prioritize alarm response. This ensures critical asset issues are addressed first, minimizing downtime and optimizing resource allocation.

There are three main methods for defining asset criticality within VF for your equipment and systems:

1. Bulk Input:  Import your existing Asset Criticality Analysis data directly during the onboarding process. This allows you to leverage your established criticality rankings. See the Inventory Upload article for more details.
2. Manual Single Input:  Set/adjust the criticality of a singular existing asset.
   • Open the Asset slideout.
   • Open the Asset Criticality dropdown list.
   • Select the desired Criticality level.

   • Click on the blue Update button to save the change.

     

3. Manual Bulk Input: Set/adjust the criticality of multiple existing assets.
   • On the Asset table, select all the assets whose criticality need to be assigned/edited.
   • Click on the three-dot menu at the top left of the table.
   • Click on "Assign Asset Criticality".
   • After selecting the desired criticality, click the blue "OK" button.
     

Alarm Importance

When multiple alarms are present at the same time, alarm data must be organized and presented to the operator so they know which one(s) to respond to first (which are most important). Alarm importance is characterized by the following alarm attributes in VF:

1. Alarm priority
2. Asset criticality
3. Service failure (True or False)

How Asset Criticality Influences Alarm Response

For applications where alarm priority has not been set systematically based on consequence or Service Level Agreement (SLA), it is recommended that asset criticality and service failure be used as the primary means for evaluating alarm importance.

The fields “Asset Criticality” and “Service Failure Alarm” can be added to the relevant alarm display as shown below. This enables them to be used to sort and filter for alarm importance. 

Figure. Using Asset Criticality and Service Failure to View by Alarm Importance

Note: Service Failure Alarms indicate a complete or partial failure of a critical service (temperature, flow, relative humidity, pressure) supplied by a piece of equipment, system, or a space. These require immediate attention to minimize downtime and potential impact.