A free sample from Asset Criticality, Book 2 of the NJN Consulting Asset Management Series.
Most asset management failures are not failures of execution — they are failures of focus. A maintenance team running flat-out can still be doing the wrong work, on the wrong assets, in the wrong order. Asset Criticality is the discipline that decides what matters most, and therefore where the team's limited attention should go.
Without a defensible criticality classification, every other AM decision — tactic selection, spares stocking, work prioritisation, capex justification — is being made by gut feel. With one, the rest of the framework has somewhere to anchor.
A practitioner's guide.
Chapter 1 · Why Criticality? The Foundation of All AM Decisions
Plus 9-12 further chapters covering the full pillar — see book pages for the complete table of contents.
No organization has unlimited maintenance resources. Time, money, skilled people, and management attention are all finite. The central challenge of asset management is therefore not whether to maintain assets — it is deciding which assets to maintain intensively, which to maintain routinely, and which to leave to operate-to-failure.
This is not a guess. It is not a matter of seniority or opinion. It is a structured, risk-based decision — and Asset Criticality is the framework that makes it.
Operations without a formal criticality framework consistently exhibit two expensive failure patterns simultaneously: over-maintenance of low-risk assets (waste), and under-maintenance of high-risk assets (catastrophic failure). A working criticality register eliminates both.
Risk-based classification that drives every downstream decision.
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