Maintenance teams make tough decisions every day. Data-driven tools, like the Ranking Index for Maintenance Expenditure (RIME) can help teams prioritize the most critical maintenance tasks, stay on track with ongoing jobs, and get the most out of their limited resources. eMaint CMMS makes it much easier to implement RIME ranking and standardize it across your organization.
eMaint embraces connected reliability, where hardware, software, and services combine in a cloud-based ecosystem. Integrating with systems across an enterprise can bring powerful insights and cross-team visibility. Armed with this information, leaders can make data-driven decisions about maintenance and production.
In this article, we’ll talk about how RIME ranking works and how it can benefit decision-makers throughout the organization. We’ll also explain exactly how eMaint works with RIME ranking, and how you can make sure you’re optimizing your work prioritization tools.
What is the Ranking Index for Maintenance Expenditures?
RIME is essentially a system for managing priorities. It works by using an objective scale to determine asset criticality and task criticality. RIME then uses a simple formula to decide on the priority of each task. There’s even a way to recalculate the priority of your backlogged jobs.
RIME ranking is popular across many different organizations, but it is especially useful for teams facing budgetary or labor constraints. When resources are tight, it’s important to make sure you always allocate those resources effectively.
How Does RIME Work?
Start by assigning each of your assets a number between one and 10 using an asset criticality analysis. Your most critical assets – the assets that will bring your production line to halt if they break down – should be a 10. Assets that you rely on for safety should also be ranked a 10. In the same way, if an equipment breakdown could cause an environmental hazard, you should rank those assets a 10. From there, rank your remaining assets according to their importance to production and safety.
Once you’ve ranked all of your assets, it’s time to rank your possible maintenance tasks. Emergency jobs, like addressing a breakdown or a safety hazard, are always ranked a 10, no matter which equipment is impacted by the emergency. Dealing with a potential future breakdown gets a lower ranking. Preventive maintenance tasks also get a slightly lower ranking.
Calculating Maintenance Expenditures with RIME Ranking
Now, whenever a maintenance task comes up, simply multiply the asset’s criticality ranking by the maintenance task ranking. The resulting number is your RIME ranking. So, if your most critical asset breaks down and needs to be repaired, that task has a priority level of 10 x 10, or 100. If, on the other hand, a relatively unimportant piece of equipment needs cleaning, that gets a lower priority.
How to Handle Outstanding Maintenance Tasks
Even seemingly minor maintenance tasks need to get done. That’s why the RIME ranking automatically increases with age. If a task is backlogged for a week, its RIME ranking increases by 5 points. The ranking gets a 5 point boost for every week that the task goes undone. This ensures that eventually, you’ll get to those outstanding jobs, no matter how small they may seem.
How Can You Determine Asset Criticality?
Teams with expertise constraints can struggle to determine how critical each piece of equipment is. In the same way, it can be tough to assign a criticality rank to your maintenance tasks.
eMaint can help. eMaint stores your past work orders so that you can assess the criticality of each asset and each maintenance event. If you use failure codes, you can search even more easily. eMaint’s reporting function can show you which tools are the most maintainable, too.
Fluke also offers an asset criticality workshop which trains teams to assign a RIME ranking number to an asset. The workshop, run by experts in the field, teaches you exactly what to look for when ranking your equipment, and explains how to assess factors like safety, environmental impact, and operational severity.
To learn more, see How to Complete an Asset Criticality Assessment.
Using eMaint for RIME Ranking
We’ve already seen that eMaint can help build your asset criticality ranking. eMaint can also help your teams use RIME ranking in their daily work. eMaint offers a RIME rank dashboard that can automatically prioritize tasks based on asset criticality and tasks. The built-in tool even takes the time factor into account.
eMaint uses work priority, asset criticality, and time to calculate the RIME ranking for each maintenance task. In addition, eMaint automatically populates the priority level on your work orders, so that you don’t have to worry about human error.
What Are the Benefits of Using RIME Ranking with eMaint?
Using RIME ranking has clear benefits for any organization. It ensures that your maintenance crews always address the most pressing issues in a timely manner. It also provides a way to standardize your maintenance priorities so that no matter who’s on shift, issues will always be addressed correctly. eMaint makes using RIME easy, so your crew is sure to use it. The RIME ranking dashboard is built into eMaint X5, making it a no-brainer to use the tool whenever you create a work order.
eMaint also automatically stores your past work orders so that you can track how well RIME ranking is working for your operation. Get reports on maintenance spend, or check how often maintenance tasks are carried out to completion. You’ll see improvements in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and timeliness. And that’s sure to translate to greater productivity and less downtime, which means a win for everyone on your team and visibility for leaders outside of maintenance, too.