Determine the business impact of your problem
When you report a problem to IBM®, you will be asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are reporting. Use the following criteria:
| Severity | Business impact |
| 1 | Critical: You are unable to use the program, resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate solution. |
| 2 | Significant: The program is usable but is severely limited. |
| 3 | Some: The program is usable with less significant features (not critical to operations) unavailable. |
| 4 | Minimal: The problem causes little impact on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem has been implemented. |