Priorities and Response Times

Priority is the field that determines cost. It is usually set by whoever is reporting, based on how annoyed they are.

A scale that works

Four levels, defined by consequence rather than by urgency of feeling.

P1 — Emergency. Food safety at immediate risk, service stopped, or a safety hazard. Refrigeration out of temperature with product in it. Gas odour. Suppression discharge. Water ingress affecting electrical equipment. Total loss of hot water. Sewage backup.

Response: within hours, including out of hours. Emergency rates apply.

P2 — Urgent. Service degraded but continuing. One fryer of three. Ice machine down. One walk-in of two. Dishwasher not sanitising. HVAC failure in extreme weather.

Response: same day or next business day. Standard rates.

P3 — Routine. Working with a fault. Door seal, light, slow drain, noisy fan, single burner out.

Response: within a week, batched with other work at the site.

P4 — Scheduled. Preventive work and planned improvements.

Response: on the calendar.

Why the definitions matter more than the labels

Emergency has to be expensive and rare. If everything is P1, the premium is paid constantly and the genuine emergency has no priority left to distinguish it.

Batching is where the saving is. Three P3 items at one site, done in one visit, cost a fraction of three separate call-outs. This requires a queue and the discipline not to dispatch immediately.

Site managers need the definitions in front of them. Print them on the reporting form. Without that, priority is a mood.

The escalation question

Who can declare a P1? If anyone can, everything is one. If only a regional manager can, genuine emergencies wait for a phone call at 9pm.

A workable rule: site managers can declare P1 for a defined list of conditions — refrigeration out of temperature with product, gas odour, suppression discharge, sewage, no hot water, safety hazard. Anything else is P2 unless approved.

The defined list is the mechanism. It gives managers authority for the cases that genuinely need it and removes the judgement call for everything else.

Response time versus resolution time

Two different commitments and vendors conflate them deliberately.

Response is arrival on site. Resolution is the equipment working.

A four-hour response with a three-day parts wait is a three-day outage. Agreements that specify response only are agreements that guarantee a visit.

Specify both where it matters, and specify what happens when parts are not available — a temporary measure, a loan unit, a written plan.

Temporary measures

For P1 conditions, the immediate question is not repair but continuity.

Refrigeration: move product, rent a unit, use a neighbouring site.

Fryer or cooking equipment: menu adjustment, which the kitchen can action immediately.

Ice: bagged ice from a supplier.

Dishwasher: manual three-sink procedure, which every kitchen should know and few have practised.

Hot water: in most jurisdictions a restaurant cannot operate without it. This is a closure decision, not a workaround.

Document the temporary measure on the work order, because it affects both the food safety record and the true cost of the failure.

What to write down

For each priority level, in the operations manual:

The definition, with examples. Who can declare it. The expected response and resolution. The approval threshold for spend. The escalation contact if the vendor does not meet the commitment. The temporary measure to take while waiting.

One page per site, laminated, by the phone. This sounds unsophisticated and it is what actually gets used at 7pm on a Saturday when the general manager is dealing with a failure and a full dining room.

The laminated card

The artefact that actually gets used, and it is one page.

Front: the four priority levels with three examples each, and what to do immediately for each of the emergency conditions.

Back: who to call for what. The reporting route, the after-hours number, the utility emergency number, the suppression contractor, the plumber, the refrigeration contractor, and who at head office to escalate to.

Site-specific, because the contractors differ by region.

Laminated and by the phone, not in a manual and not on a shared drive.

Reviewed at every site visit, because they go out of date, disappear and end up in a locked office.

This is the least sophisticated item in the whole programme and it is what a general manager will actually reach for at 9pm on a Saturday, which makes it more valuable than most of the software.