How To Prioritize Maintenance Work Orders

How To Prioritize Maintenance Work Orders for Accessibility, Reliability, and Efficiency

If your work orders are a mess, your workspace — both physical and mental — is likely a mess, too. Poor work order prioritization might not only cause delays but likely also lead to other operational issues.

Using a simple computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), your company can quickly sort work orders by priority, time, technician, asset, and other data to help streamline work order management significantly. But how do you prioritize maintenance tasks?

Learn how using a reliable CMMS can help you prioritize maintenance work orders by quickly evaluating how critical a task is, recognizing potential risks, and noting available resources.

What Is Work Order Prioritization?

Almost every organization utilizes work orders for their maintenance teams to help keep their business and assets up and running. By implementing a systematic method for ranking tasks based on their importance, criticality, impact, and more, maintenance managers and their teams can best assess which tasks take priority to keep systems operating smoothly.

Why Is Work Order Prioritization Important for Maintenance?

It’s inevitable — every organization has maintenance work orders to complete to keep their business up and running. Without a system in place to prioritize and organize work orders it can be difficult to know which to complete first, which can wait, which requires more resources, and more.

By completing maintenance work orders according to how vital they are for the success of your business, you can better maintain your assets and meet your business goals. 

It’s often common for maintenance managers to assign work orders based on the order the request comes in, but many organizations should consider organizing work orders in an optimal way to minimize complications.

UpKeep’s CMMS offers work order software that allows maintenance managers and technicians to easily prioritize and view maintenance work orders to ensure the most critical tasks are completed first. By implementing this tool, you can minimize:

• Wasted technician hours
• Missed critical tasks
• Unhappy customers
• Unhappy management

Wasted Maintenance Hours and Labor Costs

Without effective maintenance work order prioritization, you can easily accidentally spend more money on technician hours and labor costs than you need. 

Typically, technicians are paid differently depending on their knowledge and experience. Without taking a few minutes to prioritize tasks, you might send a more experienced technician to perform a mundane task while a more critical and specialized work order gets delayed because your experienced technicians are tied up. 

UpKeep not only allows you to prioritize work orders, but you can also easily manage your maintenance schedule and assign technicians to work orders.

Missing Critical Tasks

We understand it might be easiest to assign work orders based on the order they come in, but this can quickly lead to more emergent tasks becoming worse and a backlog of work. 

Without the knowledge of which work orders should be attended to first, vital maintenance work on critical assets can easily fade into the background, leading to more problems, more money, and more technician time.

Unsatisfied Customers

It’s true what they say — unhappy customers can quickly ruin your reputation. As a maintenance manager, establishing a work order prioritization system helps keep your customers satisfied. 

If your organization doesn’t directly serve customers, consider your operators to be your customers. Without proper functioning equipment, operators can’t perform their jobs. Unreliable equipment leads to asset downtime which leads to delayed production and more.

Unsatisfied Management

Without prioritizing work orders, maintenance inefficiencies may quickly rise. This typically leads to higher labor costs and more man hours. When equipment continues to fail and maintenance costs continue to rise, management likely becomes frustrated.

5 Considerations When Prioritizing Maintenance Work Orders

Using a CMMS helps streamline work order management, but prioritizing work orders is a different beast entirely. To do so effectively, you need data points like:

• Safety
• Criticality
• Value of maintenance
• Risks
• Resources

#1: Safety 

Typically, work orders that address safety issues are considered to be high-priority, even if they don’t directly or necessarily affect production. 

By first assessing the safety of the issue present in a work order, you can better determine where a specific work order should be prioritized.

When businesses violate the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), the consequences are costly. Not only are there financial penalties for violations, but injured workers can lead to workplace disruptions, damaged business reputations, and affected lives.

For example, a work order comes through to fix the guard rail of a process machine. The guard rail doesn’t affect how the machine works, thus not affecting production; however, it’s a high-priority concern because it puts the operator's safety at risk. 

UpKeep minimizes and prevents OSHA violations by allowing team members to generate reports and documentation in PDF format that they can easily share with team members and auditors in an easy-to-use, mobile-first solution. 

Our safety and compliance tool allows team members to:

• Locate and read important and historical documents in minutes
• Stay up-to-date on preventive maintenance tasks
• Easily conduct inspections
• Conduct regular safety checks

#2: Criticality

The criticality of your asset determines whether delaying work would significantly disrupt your processes. If an asset is critical to your core operations, you’ll likely need to set work orders involving that asset to a high priority, but only if it poses a significant risk. 

Maintenance tasks can generally be categorized into one of four categories to help determine how critical of a task a work order is:

• Emergency tasks are urgent and typically cause health or safety problems or workplace disruptions. No matter how long a work order list is, these tasks are automatically taken care of first. These might include loss of water or power supplies, HVAC failure, key asset breakdowns, major security issues, or natural disasters. 

• High-priority tasks will directly affect operations in the near future. These might include a leaking roof, frequently used equipment that is not performing well, safety inspections, or key asset repairs.

• Medium-priority tasks are typically things that belong on the preventive maintenance schedule. If not addressed, they will eventually cause operation disruptions, but they don’t need to be tended to immediately. These might include things like replacing filters, changing oil, checking asset mechanics, scheduling services, etc.
• Low-priority tasks are not vital to day-to-day operations. Typically, maintenance teams can use these tasks as “fill-in” work when they have time in their schedule. These might include non-critical repairs, non-emergent installations or replacements, decorative paintings, etc.

#3: Value of Maintenance

Similar to determining the criticality of a work order, here you must determine how much value a work order task holds for your business. Obviously, emergencies take precedence, but how do you determine the value of other maintenance tasks?

Consider these four questions to help decide how high or low-value a maintenance work order task might be:

1. How valuable is it to my organization? 
2. How long will it take to complete?
3. Where is it?
4. What happens if it’s not completed?

#4: Risks

Just because an asset is critical and valuable does not mean it always automatically trumps other work orders. 

How can you determine this?

Typically, if a work order deals with a safety issue or problem that’s likely on a core asset, you’ll probably want to categorize it as high-risk and make it a higher priority. Again, emergencies would pose the highest risk and take precedence as the highest priority. 

On the other hand, preventive maintenance tasks are likely not high-risk and don’t typically need to be treated that way. About 30% of preventive maintenance tasks don’t add much value, so their risk remains low.

Maintenance management teams can utilize the risk-based matrix to better determine a work order’s risk when making decisions on prioritization. The basic principle is to develop risk areas and then quantify the levels of severity for each risk as it relates to your business. 

Some risk factor examples, high to low-priority, include:

• Immediate health and safety threat
• Non-immediate health and safety threat
• Immediate production loss
• Potential production loss
• Preventive maintenance
• General improvements

#5: Available Resources

To quickly and effectively complete a work order, you’ll need to have sufficient resources on hand — time, personnel, and materials. If there is a shortage in any of these areas, you’ll likely need to put the work order on the back burner until you can resolve the shortage. 

While you’re here, consider the costs of certain assets. If it would cost more to repair the asset than it’s worth (or than you can afford), a work order prescribing repairs wouldn’t be urgent or even necessary. Instead, an asset replacement might be the more cost-efficient and smarter route.

Improve Work Order Processes With UpKeep’s Work Order Management Software 

Using a reliable CMMS makes prioritizing work order management easier than ever before. With built-in products that help sort and recall historical data, and allow for easy-to-access files, information, tracking, scheduling, and more, you can take away the stress of effectively prioritizing and completely maintaining work orders. 

UpKeep is the #1 CMMS used by maintenance and reliability teams for a reason. We offer solutions, tools, and information in a mobile-first software that allows maintenance teams to run operations smoothly and effectively.

Our full-featured CMMS offers:

• Work order management for maintenance teams to easily create, manage, and complete work orders from anywhere
• Preventive maintenance to help reduce asset downtime
• Asset management to help increase the lifecycle of organization equipment and allow for easier data-driven decisions on repairs and replacements
• Parts and inventory to help know what resources are available
• And more

Learn to better prioritize maintenance work orders to keep your organization operating as efficiently as possible. Contact us today.