Setting Disciplined Priorities when Prioritizing Maintenance Work

Christer Idhammar, IDCON INC

A Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Perspective

Priority, as defined in the Franklin Dictionary, means “coming before in time, order, or importance.” When prioritizing maintenance work, one must consider its importance to the entire company in question. My experience shows that, in the real world of most maintenance departments, you can classify priorities in two groups: Emotional priorities and real priorities.

Emotional Priorities

An emotional priority is one that is based on feelings instead of objective judgment of importance. The importance of the maintenance work is judged only as it relates to the production area where the requester works.

For example, a person in operations might want to have a maintenance job done just to get it off of his or her mind. It is common to see that many of these types of priorities are requested using a standing work order number or are requested verbally, bypassing the use of a computerized or manual maintenance work request routine.

Because maintenance acts as service to operations, these methods of requesting maintenance work will continue to increase if written work requests and strict disciplines for standing work orders are not enforced. This happens because it is more convenient for the requester to have someone else document the work request than to do it himself.

Another reason why emotional priorities are common is that they often provide the only way to get a maintenance job done within a reasonable time frame. Requesters of work know when everybody in the organization is abusing the priority system.

They also know that if they try to be nice and instate a lower priority than is necessary, their specified job will never get done. Ultimately, this means that the work request will be pushed through with a higher priority than necessary.

Jobs with emotional priorities, as well as true emergencies, will bypass the planning and scheduling process and consequently cost more money.

Real Priorities

What I call “real priorities” are based on the importance of the work to be done and its benefit for the whole company or production area.

The priority of the work is based on the consequence of not doing the job and the condition of the component as measured during a component inspection. In a good organization, up to 90% of all maintenance work is a result of condition monitoring, including basic inspection routes and interviews with operators. With real priorities, more work can be planned, and after that it can be scheduled and executed in an efficient way.

A Source of Conflict

Requesters of maintenance work often have only their own production area in mind when prioritizing maintenance work, while their maintenance partners are often faced with ten “priority one” jobs from different requesters when they can only accommodate five.

This results in conflict with the people who don’t get their jobs performed. And to make matters worse, it is often the people who give the maintenance planner or supervisor the most problems if their jobs are not done who get precedent.

This is often done at the cost of others who might have had a more real need for a completed job.

Confronting the Problem

I know that many readers recognize the type of conflict I have described as if it had been taken from their own mills.

So what can you do about improving it?

I like to offer the following actions for changing the state of the maintenance process from being reactive to being planned, scheduled, and controlled:

Set up a task force between operations and maintenance with the objective of arriving at more disciplined priorities.
Educate key people about the importance of using the right priorities. Teach them that it costs several times more to do a job that breaks into a set schedule than to do a job that is planned and scheduled.
Agree that operations and maintenance will decide priorities together according to well-defined guidelines. The only jobs that justify a “priority one” (immediate action that breaks into other ongoing jobs) are jobs such as the following:

Immediate risk for personal injury or environmental damage

Production line is down, and, for example, there are no buffers of paper to keep a coater running until the job is performed.

Immediate risk for production loss or high maintenance costs

All other jobs, which should be included with examples in the priority guidelines, should be prioritized with a requested date for latest completion. For example, if a pump that has back up fails, it will not automatically constitute a “priority one” job.

Determining and using new priority guidelines will yield faster results with fewer breaks in work and increase the planning, scheduling, and control of maintenance. However, count on the fact that even this simple process of implementing guidelines might take time

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Book by IDCON

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling training and Implementation Support by IDCON.

Christer Idhammar

Christer Idhammar started his career in operations and maintenance 1961. Shortly after, in 1985, he founded IDCON INC in Raleigh North Carolina, USA. IDCON INC is now a TRM company. Today he is a frequent key note and presenter at conferences around the world. Several hundred successful companies around the world have engaged Mr. Idhammar in their reliability improvement initiatives.

A Planner's Tool Kit

About 25% of a Planner’s time should be spent in the field, assessing and “scoping” maintenance work. To make this time as useful as possible, a good “planner’s tool kit” is essential. A good planner’s tool kit should contain the following items, all in convenient package, such as a light-weight tool belt. Or we like a safety vest with lots of pockets. And, of course, all the required personal safety equipment and a cell phone or pager. As Maintenance’s “information managers”, planners should be easy to contact.

Uptime: Fill Out Work Orders? Who's Got Time for Paperwork?

"Listen: I’m a mechanic, not a clerk. Do you want me to do the work OR fill out these work orders? If I wasted all that time filling in those silly blanks on your paperwork I’d never get caught up! Besides, I don’t know why we need ‘em anyway. Let’s just do the work like we’ve always done.” Sound familiar? Maintenance work orders are often seen as an extra burden to the maintainers as well as those who are requesting the work to start with. “Paperwork. Needless paperwork. That’s all it really is anyway. I just want to call the mechanic and get this work done fast!” But without work order history, the maintenance organization is at risk and equipment problems will likely worsen.

Tips for Maintenance Planning

The work process we call maintenance planning can almost always be improved in any given mill or plant. In fact in most plants we visit maintenance planners don’t plan. Planners do all kinds of tasks except work order planning.

Centralized Maintenance vs. Decentralized

Companies often ask if maintenance planning and scheduling will work if they have a decentralized maintenance organization. Yes, it will. In fact, they need planning and scheduling just as much as a centralized shop. Let's review why.

You Cannot Maximize Production or Reduce Costs Without the use of an Effective Planned Maintenance System

Planned maintenance is a maintenance concept developed over a span of time, and is made up of numerous functions, all designed to compliment each other. Planned maintenance, then, is a maintenance program designed to improve the effectiveness of maintenance through the use of systematic methods and plans. The primary objective of the maintenance effort is to keep equipment functioning in a safe and efficient manner. This allows production to meet production targets with minimum operating cost.

Work Order Prioritization

Too many organisations neglect the benefits of a clearly defined prioritisation system. Even when they realise the importance the focus is invariably at a department or functional level. I have seen organisations where there are up to three or more prioritisation systems. None of which are inter-related. Along with work order classification, failure coding and integration with business processes, this is one of the key determinants of a maintenance systems future operation.

Work Order Execution and Data Capture

All of the work of backlog management, planning and priority targeted capacity scheduling are focussed on efficient execution. To ensure that the tasks that need to be done, as per the true requirements of the plant, are done in a timely manner with as little waste of human and material resources as is possible.

Setting Disciplined Priorities when Prioritizing Maintenance Work