Have you ever had to choose between fixing a broken economiser or completing a compliance check? Many facility managers and field service providers have. Simply put, a maintenance strategy that puts facility managers in this position too often is a poor one and can lead to significant impacts on an organisation. Even Deloitte reports that poor maintenance strategies can reduce overall productive capacity by 5 to 20%.
Work order prioritisation is a critical aspect of maintenance management across all industries. From real estate and property management to field services for telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and utilities. How can facility managers and field service management providers in these industries effectively prioritise maintenance work orders to reduce backlogs, stay compliant, and reduce the accumulation of financial risks?
Improving work order prioritisation to deliver great experiences
Creating a work order prioritisation model that works for all stakeholders and assets is crucial for delivering great experiences. Employees can’t hold effective meetings if the HVAC system in the room they want to book isn’t working and temperatures or CO2 levels are too high. Guests won’t want to visit an office if the lift is always broken. A PwC report found that speed, convenience, and up-to-date technology were some of the highest-valued factors underpinning a positive building user experience.
Today, building occupants and visitors, manufacturers, patients, travellers, and utility users expect to engage with a friction-free environment, encompassing equipment and systems working in a sustainable and operationally efficient manner. Great maintenance is more important than ever. However, research by the Building Cost Information Service indicates that maintenance expenditure continues to increase year-on-year. This increase in maintenance costs, often driven by deferred maintenance backlogs, highly reactive maintenance requirements, business continuity risks, and the increasing use of complex operational technologies, isn’t sustainable for most organisations.
A clear example of this challenge comes from a recent building management system analysis, where the maintenance team identified over 1,500 fault signals in a single building. The maintenance team realised this was a big problem, as there were too many data streams and they couldn’t sort through them all to effectively prioritise the issues. They also couldn’t send technicians to go and fix all those issues at once, so they needed some way to prioritise. This illustrates the urgent need for smarter prioritisation: not every fault requires immediate attention, and without a system to triage issues, resources are stretched thinly, and occupant experience suffers.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of simply putting off maintenance, carrying out expensive reactive repairs or servicing assets unnecessarily – approximately 30% of maintenance activities are carried out too frequently – work order prioritisation provides clarity into exactly which maintenance tasks have to be carried out and when. Being able to prioritise work orders to meet agreed objectives, reduce deferred maintenance backlogs, and better balance workloads will lead to lasting benefits for your entire organisation.
6 ways to cut costs by aligning prioritisation with objectives
There are several benefits of aligning your work order prioritisation with your broader business objectives, including:
- Balancing reactive vs preventive maintenance
- Reconciling a high volume of work orders with a limited workforce
- Overcoming maintenance backlogs
- Managing stakeholder communication and expectations
- Ensuring regulatory and safety compliance
- Meeting SLAs and response - time expectations
In my next blog, I’ll dive into each of these benefits to show how aligning work order prioritisation with your business objectives can eliminate resource waste and reduce maintenance costs.
You can learn more about advanced maintenance strategies in our e-book ‘The Future of Asset & Maintenance Management.’