Using Calculated Work Order Importance to Manage Threats to Scheduled Work

IMC-2019 Focused Forum  44:38 Minutes

by Jim Davis, Chugach Government Solutions

You will never, and shouldn’t ever, completely remove the human touch from the prioritization of planning, scheduling, assigning, and executing of work. You should have accurate and useful information in front of you when you are trying to make those critical decisions. This presentation will address our efforts to provide meaningful data to maintenance and reliability personnel by using calculated work order importance to guide work management.

The calculated work order importance is driven by work order risk assessment and asset criticality rankings. Asset/Location Criticality and Work Order Risk Assessment are rated on an integer scale from 1-10 with one being the lowest rating and ten being the highest. These two numbers are multiplied together to generate the Calculated Work Order Importance from 1-100. The calculated number is then used to drive reports highlight the relative importance of various work types.

This information is used to help the planners decide which work orders to plan first. It is also used by operations and scheduling to decide the two week look ahead schedule and weekly schedule. We schedule to a weekly bucket and allow the craft supervisors to daily and weekly work to their craft. The general guidance to the supervisors and the craft is to work the work order with the highest calculated work order importance first so that if/when emergency and urgent work break into the weekly schedule it impacts the least important work first. Supervisors are still encouraged to make smart decisions and at the end of the week they are responsible for being able to explain what happened if important work does not get accomplished. We have also developed KPIs that allow us to compare the relative importance and impact of emergent and differed work to ensure that smart decisions are being made.