The power of work oder priorities in Mincom Ellipse

For those of you who are not familiar with the Mincom Ellipse product this post will not add too much value. 

I am a particular fan of the Mincom Ellipse system and have seen it put to phenomenal use in large scale organizations globally. But you do have to get a bit smart with it.

There are lots of little legacy fields, functions and processes in there that have a huge optimizing impact but are rarely used, unknown or forgotten. Others lend themselves to a variety of processes, allowing several points of control to be established.

One of these little gems is the fact that there are two distinct priority fields on the work order. A users priority and a planners priority.

This is a fantastic filtering and backlog management tool. The user enters a priority when the work order is created. A priority preferably linked to some form of emergent work prioritization process.

Here we start to see part of the work order life cycle within the system. Passing from creation through to the planing stage where the Planner, complete with a broader picture, is able to assign her own priority. This then becomes the priority of the work.

It enables for audit-able decision trails through the planning, scheduling and final execution of the work, and provides an additional lever over backlog management.

With a rigid, process based and tested prioritization system in place, the ability to manage work can be seen via tools such as age versus priority reports, or late work order reports. When performing capacity scheduling it allows you to pick off the corrective work orders based on priority.

A very small piece of functionality with a very large potential impact. But it also goes to underline that Ellipse, or any system, will not change organisations by itself. It needs to be interlaced with robust offline decision making processes and activities.