Track: Maintenance and Reliability

Abstract

For many decades, the industry has been using risk as to the basis for prioritization of maintenance activities in the form of Risk Priority Number (RPN) and risk matrices. The risk here is defined as the product of severity and frequency. However, priority is defined as the product of importance and urgency. This study is to determine whether risk and priority are synonymous. For the determination, maintenance data for various trades were collected from two Malaysian hospitals. These data were then clustered for risk and priority using the K-means clustering algorithm and statistical tools. The results were sorted, ranked, and compared. The resulting comparison shows that risk and priority are metrics of different properties.  It was found that risk is a scalar magnitude while priority is a vector. Therefore, prioritization of maintenance by risk is a historical lagging indicator, while priority is a leading indicator and better predictor of future impact.