This article will discuss a method to identify a manageable number of Safety Critical Equipment or Element (SCE) items, and approaches for successfully managing inspection, testing and preventive maintenance (ITPM) tasks for SCE. Today's process safety practices are invariably the result of hard lessons learned by industry from major accidents. Process safety management systems are generally credited with reducing major accident risk in process industry operations. The prevention and mitigation of major accidents relies upon appropriate layers of protection or barriers working on demand. These barriers include: Plant: Hardware, such as process equipment, control systems, dikes,Process: Administrative and procedural controls People: Competent workforce, supervision, communication, and so forth. The Plant is generally the most reliable of these barriers. To ensure that the equipment prevents and mitigates major accidents it needs to be highly reliable. Some companies in the process industries have started to apply criticality ranking for process safety purposes in order to identify and manage certain equipment that requires a high reliability. The identification and management of SCE has represented a challenge to many companies. A major issue has been an overwhelming number of SCE items, as the SCE designation has often been assigned to equipment that may not be truly safety critical. This has culminated in a failure to perform all ITPM tasks when due. (c) 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Process Saf Prog 37:340-346, 2018