Do you have a matrix to prioritize work orders?
One of the challenges that many organizations face is maintaining work order priorities in the wake of the emotional squeaky wheel that yells the loudest. Remember the phrase, “In God we trust. All others bring data”? It applies here, as well. Reacting to false priorities exacerbates the reactive spiral that diverts resources from efficient work practices.
At the end of the day, I don’t know of many organizations that are overwhelmed with maintenance resources to do work. Reality is that maintenance activities are all about lessening or mitigating risk or the consequences of failure. The challenge for all involved in determining the potential risk is to estimate the probability of the breakdown occurring within a period of time. To succeed, it is important that maintenance and operations have a proactive partnership where they work together to understand and communicate the risk probability via the work order system. In order to effectively accomplish this, the organization should have a Priority Matrix. This is a matrix chart with the estimated time to the potential breakdown or functional failure on one side (typically in days) and the consequences of failure on the other side 90 degrees out. Categories may include Health and Safety, Environmental, Operations Loss, and Customer Service.
Once the organization establishes the matrix, we can’t expect people to understand the intent without training. Train everyone and hold them accountable. Early on, frequently inspect to ensure that the organization is properly following the matrix when coding the priority on the work orders and requests. Put at least a monthly audit process in place to ensure compliance is ongoing. That said, recognize that it’s a tool and not the end all. It’s an estimate that we use to set the target date for the work to be completed.
Integrate the work order priority into other work such as preventive maintenance activities and engineering projects when you create the maintenance schedules. Using this technique, only interrupt the prioritized schedule work with work of a higher or more urgent priority. Work already in progress should take priority over new work of the same or equal priority. This will help you to avoid “breaking the schedule” unnecessarily.
Do you have a Priority Matrix, and is it communicated and enforced? If not, why not?
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Filed Under: Featured, Featured Category, Maintenance Excellence | Tags: CMMS, maintenance management, operations and production, planning and scheduling
Comments
By Wilson on June 10th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Jeff,
It is very interisting. I do not use a Priority Matrix ( could you send me a copy as an example)
We work for the new equipment FMEA, based in our expertise, past ocurrence, and vendor’s recomendantion.
The current one is treated under the concept of MBTF, taking in consideration the average time to be repaired. All data are place in a data base to rorganize and planning new revision that means earlist later one.
By Mark D on June 10th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Yes, our work coordinator has a matrix to refer to. I am not sure if he does regularly, but he certainly prioritizes based on the criteria within the matrix–he just has it memorized. He pushes back on work, expedites work, and moves things around to accommodate REAL emergencies. The one issue we have is that our priorities are simply 1 through 4, with 4 being hardly used and 1/2 being used for “today”/”this week” emergencies respectively. With that portion being <10%, one could argue how much the remaining 90 percent can be prioritized when they all are a 3? We are looking into equipment criticalities to help with that. Adding equipment criticality to the mix sub-prioritizes the work. At this time, we are considering a 5×5x5 matrix giving criticality rankings from 1-125. That should be sufficient for additional prioritization. It won;t be the final decision-maker, but it should help keep all the work in good perspective.
By Jeff Shiver on June 15th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
To both Wilson and Mark,
One of the purposes of the Priority Matrix is to calibrate all who enter work requests or notifications (i.e. Operators) so that you can attempt to establish true priorities. Wilson, I did forward an example to you for consideration.
To your point, one or two priority numbers doesn’t provide much spread. I generally like to see about six for providing an effective distribution that you can action.
When you multiply Criticality with Priority, you have created RIME (Ranking Index for Maintenance Expenditures) which is an old measure and used by some organizations today. Critically is assigned to the equipment when the equipment hierarchy was developed during the CMMS/ EAM implementation.
By Mark D on June 16th, 2010 at 8:13 am
Another Engineer and I have been toying with a new criticality/prioritization scheme. Basically, we are going to propose a 3 digit crticality number to be used for prioritization purposes. The number although appearing to be a single number is actually 3 separate pieces of information. The first digit represents severity of consequence of the typical or most anticipated failure. The second represents inherent redundancy per the reliability strategy (inline spare, stocked spare, no spare). The third number is the average P-F Interval or MTBF expected for the equipment. This last one is tricky. I don’t like probability or liklihood of failure because they don’t speak to timing unless you can do Weibull analysis or similar. However, based on FMEAs and MTTF/MTBF data, is more useful and more readily available from a CMMS. So this last digit helps gauge time to repair. I don’t think emergency situations are the challenge…they are readily assessed and addressed. It’s all the “we don’t have to fix it right away” stuff that eventually leaves something behind to be forgotten. Then we can compare any prioritization number to the age of the work order (that is an easy report). Also, the order of the number is key–Severity is the biggest determiner, Redundancy next, and P-F interval third. If we use a simple range of 1-5 for each, a criticality number would look like 555 for the most extremely urgent case vs 111 for the least urgent. However, one could now judge a 523 as more critical equipment than a 345, AND they can tell why at a glance. Does this mean that strict rules apply? No. Could there be a reason that the 345 goes ahead the 523 in the maintenance schedule? Sure. But trying to keep all those reasons sorted out has got to be tough on the one individual prioritizing. We believe this number also still works mathematically/statistically in terms of sorting, histograms, etc. Over time, if engineering or process changes effect the rankings of any of the three numbers, then the criticality would simply be updated. Lots of information here. Thoughts and comments?