Translating expert knowledge into production rules has been the most difficult and time-consuming when building expert systems (Buchanan et al. 1983). Especially, buidling hierarchical structure, i. e. developing sequential or dominant relationship among production rules is one of the most important and difficult processes. Hierarchical relationship among rules has been typically determined in the course of interviewing human experts. Since this interviewing procedure is rather subjective, however, the hierarchically structured rules produced in terms of interviewing is widely exposed to the severe discussion about their validity (Nisbett and Wilson 1977 : Ericsson and Simon 1980 : Kellog 1982). We thus need an objective method to effectively translate human expert knowledge into structured rules. As such a method, this paper suggests the order anlaysis technique that has been studied in psychometries (Cliff 1977 : Reynolds 1981 : Wise 1983). In this paper we briefly introduce the order analysis and explain how it can be applied to building hierarchical structure of production rules. We also illustrate how bankrupcy prediction rules of small-medium companies can be developed using this order analysis technique. Further, we validata the effectiveness of these rules developed by the order analysis, in comparison with those built by other methods. The rules developed by the proposed outperform those of the other traditional methods in effectively screening the bankrupted firms.