Criticality analysis is a technique for the assessment of criticality rating for every constitutive part. Failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA) are broadly utilized for characterizing, distinguishing and dispensing with potential failures from system, design, or process for the criticality analysis. The determination of the critical ranking of failure modes for criticality analysis is a vital issue of FMECA. The traditional method of FMECA determines the critical ranking of failure modes using the risk priority numbers, which is the product of evaluation criteria like the occurrence, severity and detection of each failure mode but it may not be realistic in some applications. The practical applications reveal that the criticality analysis using traditional FMECA has been considerably criticized for several reasons. In this paper, first, a detailed FMEA to find out the various failure modes of each component of a conventional lathe machine is performed and thereafter, the Fuzzy FMECA approach is used to perform the criticality analysis. A comparative analysis of fuzzy FMECA with traditional FMECA is also done to find out the most superior approach for the criticality analysis. It was concluded that the fuzzy FMECA approach is the most superior approach for the criticality analysis of a system. © 2020, The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden.