The presence of risk totally changes the way to allocate maintenance job priority if you want to compare situations equally1.
Maintenance work order priority matrix.
Sometimes it seems like every work order demands to be top priority this can be frustrating and overwhelming for a busy facilities manager but in the words of douglas adams don t panic here is a quick guideline to help you prioritize your work orders.
Scheduled maintenance this refers to maintenance or service requests that are planned and scheduled in advance.
The maintenance planner faces a daily process of balancing out the resources available based on the demand from operations and maintenance on how to achieve the best outcomes in terms of risk to productive output quality safety and waste in the daily management of the plant or manufacturing process facility.
The literature review outlines the maintenance priority setting methods used in various case studies.
How to prioritize maintenance work orders.
So far it seems pretty simple but let s now explore some of the intricacies of applying this in practice.
We can however create some ground rules to assist with this particularly where planned work orders are concerned.
A discussion on the pros and cons of the maintenance priority setting methods was carried out.
In order to effectively accomplish this the organization should have a priority matrix.
What is a work order priority.
Is typically more than two business days and the work has been scheduled with either the technician and or the customer.
Defining work order priorities there can be no perfect method of defining or establishing work order priority.
When you work with risk you cannot use a linear priority scale.
In most organisations the workload is dynamic and priorities are constantly being monitored and changed.
The work order priority system often goes unnoticed as a great opportunity for boosting maintenance performance.
Focus in on this low tech high value approach as a way to boost your maintenance performance.
Restructuring such a.
Through the supervisor or technician assigned to the work order.
Applying work order priorities in practice.
These can then be combined in a risk matrix similar to the one shown in figure 1 below to give an overall work order priority.
We focus our attention on big initiatives and technology and few if any vendors try to sell us a new priority system.
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.
Figure 1 sample risk matrix.