Making jobs process and print sooner

Occasionally, you might need to give one or more jobs a higher priority so that they process through the workflow sooner than they would otherwise. You can use the Job priority job property to move the jobs through their workflow faster.

Job priority is a numerical value from 1 through 999. RICOH ProcessDirector processes jobs with a priority of 1 through each of their steps before other jobs with lower priorities that are queued to the steps. For example, RICOH ProcessDirector processes jobs with a priority of 50 through the steps at a later time, and processes jobs with a priority of 99 at an even later time.

The Job priority property of a job is not a required property, although it might be set by a step based on the SetJobPropsFromTextFile step template. If you configure the step to set the Job priority property, consider having the step set the value between 10 and 999. You can then use the values from 1 through 9 to move jobs through the workflow faster.

Changing the priority of a job to 1 does not suspend all processing of other jobs, and does not move this job through the workflow immediately. Changing the priority moves the job to the front of the queue for processing in each step of its workflow. If two jobs have the same priority, RICOH ProcessDirector processes the first of the jobs that arrives at a step.

When a job is part of an order, it inherits the priority level of the order. Changing the order priority updates the priority of the jobs it contains. However, you can update the priority of an individual job in an order, without affecting its sibling jobs or the order itself.

To make one or more jobs process and print sooner:

  1. In the Jobs table, select the job or jobs that you want to process sooner.
  2. Right-click one of them and select Set Priority.
  3. For each job, click the row under the Job priority column and enter a value to set the priority.
    Keep in mind that RICOH ProcessDirector considers any job with an assigned priority value more important than a job without a priority value.
  4. Optional: From this page, you can use the Schedule action to request a specific printer for the jobs.
  5. Click OK.
If you want to move a job or a group of jobs through their workflow steps ahead of all other jobs on the system, you can use the Promote action. RICOH ProcessDirector processes promoted jobs first, regardless of the priority of other jobs on the system.