This is an Example of a Risk-Ranking Matrix

Everything Can't be Important at the Same Time

Lets say you have 1 worker. He must do 1 of the following jobs within the 8 hour shift. And each job takes 8 hours.

Thus, you must pick 1 and only 1. The point is, Although everything seems equally important, there can only be 1 answer. This is the dilemma every organization (and site) has when trying to manage the backlog. Also consider the point that each week brings in new work to the backlog which could be more important than the previously priority work.

A Risk-Based Prioritization Matrix Ensures Fair and Accurate Ranking

With the creation of a risk-based prioritization matrix, the leadership team has a formal ranking. The program consists of a user-defined matrix, a new field on the work order table called RANKING, an automation script which scans the matrix, and a cron task which runs as often as you want (e.g., nightly).

Getting Started

Let’s assume you have thousands of assets, many stakeholder demands, a growing backlog of work and limited maintenance staff. Lets also assume there is a high amount of reactive maintenance. Plus operations has lost trust in maintenance to keep things running.

The first step is to build a comprehensive location hierarchy and asset registry.?Then, using an assessment team, develop a grading process to risk-rank each asset. These results would be stored against the asset record (e.g. new asset BRE tab which asks a series of questions about the asset to establish the Business Risk Exposure).

Understand the Work Order Process

A work order is written against an asset.?The WO should first be given a WorkType categorization such as CM, PM, CBT, MOD, ADMIN, or CBM. This work order could then be designated as Emergency, Urgent, or Plannable by the requester.?The emergency work is dispatched, and, the urgent work gets onto next DAILY PLAN.?But, it is the Plannable work that we want to focus on.

Plannable Work

The WO PRIORITY field can be used to define plannable work using the priority range of 3 to 7.?This is meant to grade “how important this work is to all other work within their backlog”, and/or it could mean, how important is this job to the "dynamics of the day".?? Note: This is not the final numerical ranking.

The person doing the grading should have some familiarity with current backlog.??This WO prioritization could be done by the Call Center Desk, Gatekeeper, Senior Planner, or a Maintenance Supervisor.?No human however can precisely compare one WO against an existing backlog with hundreds (or even thousands) of work orders. But in this case, a SWAG is okay.

Setting Up the Automatic Ranking Procedure

Schedule a team meeting of all concerned stakeholders (ops, maintenance, HSE, planners, material management, etc.) to discuss all possible categories for the work order matrix. Have the CMMS admin add a new field to the WO record called RANKING. The CMMS can have a WO RISK-BASED PRIORITY MATRIX [post picture] which automatically derives the RANKING value.?Some work orders may have similar values once ranked, but these can be separated by Report Date (i.e., FIFO). The key to this design is to create a matrix with appropriate?categories (X-axis) intersected with asset criticality groupings (Y-axis), and accommodate every possible scenario.

What are the Overall Benefits?

The above design blends asset criticality/risk, work order priority, work type, and WO risk, to create a fair ranking of all open work. This is extremely important to the planner trying to decide what work to plan next b.t.w., and to the scheduler when building an automated (resource-leveled) weekly schedule.