Editors note:  This is the second article in a series of articles by Dave Army and Ralph Hedding.

Click here to read Part 1: The Identification of Work.

Click here to read Part 3: Long Range Scheduling

Click here to read Part 4: Look Ahead Scheduling

Click here to read Part 5: Materials Management

Click here to read Part 6: Preventive Maintenance

In Part 1, I discussed the importance of Work Identification. In this article, I will, cover the second element of SAMI’s Stage 1 model for Maintenance Excellence, prioritization. As you may recall Stage 1 includes the following elements:

• Work Identification
• Prioritization
• Planning
• Scheduling
• Work Execution
• Trending and Follow-up
• Preventive Maintenance
• Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)

As a universal concept, everyone knows what emergency work is? Its that problem that has to be fixed right now. Drop everything and attend to it, regardless of the cost and the impact on other activities. As maintenance professionals, we’re conditioned to this response and are rewarded by our ability to immediately address these crises. You all know the feeling; the boss comes up and pats you on the back, praising you for a job “well done.” We live for those moments and these traits characterize a reactive organization.

In a well-disciplined, highly evolved organization (I don’t mean maintenance department), true emergencies are few and far between. In organizations that are less evolved, high priority activities are the rule rather than the exception. Why does this happen, and what are the impacts?

As a rule of thumb, work can be segregated into about 5 levels of urgency (priority):

1. Really, really important – The world will cease to exist as we know it
2. Kind of important – Needs to be done pretty soon, or we’ll really have a problem
3. It can wait – Can be done in due time
4. Fill in – Nice to do, minor in nature, get it when you can (This priority is often considered a “black hole”)
5. Shutdown required – Need a system or equipment outage to perform

When production or operations departments have no confidence or trust in the ability of maintenance to accomplish work in a timely manner, priorities will often get inflated. A priority 2 will become a priority 1, or a priority 3 will become a priority 2. Why is this? Simply stated, the person creating the priority knows that unless the Work Order enjoys a high priority, it will never get done.

If a Work Order initially receives a priority of 3 or 4, it disappears into the Maintenance “black Hole.” Therefore, the originator inflates the priority. By the time you know it, work is dominated by emergency and high priority work. If management attempts to control the amount of high priority work (requiring justification for P-1 activities is a common ploy) without an accompanying process change, then the baseline emergencies drops. For example P-2 work orders take over and are often followed up by phone calls. I remember a time, long ago, when as a maintenance manager; my organization went through one of those attempts at control. I ended up seeing work orders with priorities of 2 HOT!, 2 ***, 2 in Red, etc. You get the picture.

When we assess organizations for their level of Asset Management sophistication, we look for the number of high priority work orders as a percentage of total work. This gives us an indication of how much control the organization has over emergent work. Without exception, P-1 and P-2 activities are unknown immediately prior to execution and consequently conducted with little or no pre-planning. Parts are most likely unavailable, and other work will get interrupted. We calculate that emergent, high priority cost three times more, take three times longer to complete and are three times less likely to be successful than planned work. This tells us that there are potentially great financial savings to be gained by reducing the amount of high priority, emergent work.

What can an organization do? Some answers are contained within the priority setting process. Simply defining and training personnel in the priorities and educating them about the consequences of insisting on high priorities will help. However, the most effective way to reduce the impact of high priority reactive work is to modify the planning and scheduling processes. This will result in an atmosphere that will allow work to be performed in a timely manner. If work won’t be ignored, and the production or operations personnel feel that work will get done, prior to failure, they will resist the temptation to inflate priorities. This approach will subsequently result in a lessening of stress on the maintenance organization. We’ll discuss these process improvements in a later article.

Click here to visit the SAMI web site

Click here to return to Home Page