If you ask a maintenance supervisor how many of today's jobs are urgent, the honest answer is often "all of them". Every requester marks their job as top priority because experience has taught them that anything lower never gets done. The result is that truly critical jobs compete with minor ones, planned work is constantly interrupted and the backlog grows. A clear prioritisation system restores order.
Why priorities break down
- No agreed definitions — "urgent" means different things to different people.
- Requesters set priority with no review.
- Low-priority jobs never get done, so people inflate priorities.
- Loudest voice wins.
- No link to how important the asset actually is.
Define clear priority levels
A typical set:
- P1 — Emergency: immediate risk to safety, environment or a critical production line stopped. Attend immediately, drop other work.
- P2 — Urgent: production significantly affected or a failure likely within a day. Attend within a few hours.
- P3 — High: degraded performance, workaround in place. Schedule within days.
- P4 — Normal: no immediate impact. Plan and schedule within weeks.
- P5 — Shutdown: work that can only be done during a planned shutdown.
Write examples next to each level for your own plant. "Coolant leak on the floor near walkway" is P1 or P2 because of slip risk; "slow coolant drip contained in tray" might be P3.
Use asset criticality
The same fault matters more on some assets than others. A bearing noise on the only furnace is far more important than the same noise on one of five identical fans. Rank assets by criticality — for example A, B and C — considering:
- Safety and environmental consequences of failure.
- Impact on production: is it a bottleneck, is there redundancy?
- Impact on quality.
- Repair cost and lead time for parts.
Build a priority matrix
Combine asset criticality with the consequence of the specific fault. A simple matrix might be:
- Critical asset + production stopped or safety risk → P1.
- Critical asset + degraded performance → P2.
- Important asset + production stopped → P2.
- Important asset + degraded → P3.
- Low-criticality asset + any non-safety fault → P3 or P4.
- Any asset + immediate safety hazard → P1.
The matrix doesn't remove judgement, but it makes decisions consistent and explainable.
Response and completion targets
For each priority, set a target response time (when someone attends) and target completion time. Then measure performance against them. If P3 jobs are never completed within their target, either the target or the capacity is unrealistic — and that's a conversation to have with management, not hide.
Who decides
Requesters describe the problem and its impact; a maintenance supervisor or planner confirms the priority using the matrix. For disputed cases, a quick conversation between the area manager and the maintenance supervisor resolves it. Over time, as requesters see that P3 and P4 jobs actually get done, priority inflation falls.
Ageing and escalation
A low-priority job left for months can become a high-priority failure. Review ageing jobs weekly: raise priority where risk is increasing, and close jobs that are no longer needed. Escalation rules — for example, P3 jobs older than two weeks appear on the supervisor's dashboard — prevent jobs from being forgotten.
Protecting planned work
P1 jobs must interrupt planned work. P2 jobs often can. But P3 and P4 should not displace scheduled work — they go into the backlog for the next schedule. This rule is what allows planned maintenance and PM to happen at all.
Monitoring the system
- Distribution of jobs by priority — if more than about 20–30% are P1/P2, investigate.
- Response and completion against targets, by priority.
- Number of priority changes after review.
- Repeat P1 jobs on the same asset — a sign of underlying reliability problems.
An example: a food plant
In a food plant, over 60% of work orders were marked "urgent". The maintenance manager introduced five levels with plant-specific examples, ranked assets A/B/C, and had supervisors confirm priorities each morning. Within two months, P1 and P2 jobs fell to about a quarter of the total, response times for genuine emergencies improved, and the weekly schedule held for the first time — because minor jobs no longer interrupted planned work.
Common mistakes
- Too many priority levels with vague definitions.
- Requester-set priorities never reviewed.
- No asset criticality ranking.
- Low-priority work never completed, which drives inflation.
- No ageing review.
How software helps
A CMMS can store asset criticality, suggest priority from the matrix when a request is raised, enforce supervisor confirmation, track response and completion against targets and escalate ageing jobs automatically. See work order management software.
Talk to us about setting up maintenance priorities that hold.
Handling requests from management
Requests from senior managers often jump the queue regardless of their real impact. The matrix should apply to everyone. When a manager's request is genuinely low impact, explain where it sits and when it will be done; most managers accept this once they see the system is applied consistently and that it protects their own critical equipment.
Priorities and spare parts
A high-priority job that waits days for a part is not really being treated as high priority. Review which critical assets have spares on the shelf, and link asset criticality to stocking decisions — see our guide to spare parts criticality.
Frequently asked questions
How many priority levels should we use?
Four or five is usually enough: emergency, urgent, high, normal and planned shutdown work. More levels add confusion without improving decisions.
Who sets the priority?
The requester suggests it, but maintenance supervisors or planners confirm it using an agreed matrix. Otherwise every requester picks the highest level.
What is asset criticality?
A ranking of how important each asset is, based on the consequences of its failure for safety, environment, quality, production and cost.
Should priorities change over time?
Yes. A normal-priority job left too long may need to be raised, and a job raised as urgent may be downgraded once the immediate risk is controlled.
How do we know priorities are being abused?
Track the share of jobs in each priority level. If most jobs are urgent, the system has lost meaning and needs resetting.
