What is Work Order Management?
Work order management is a process for executing, documenting, and reviewing work orders promptly. It involves systematically handling requests for work, scheduling tasks, assigning resources, and monitoring the progress and completion of these tasks. This process is essential for ensuring that work orders are carried out efficiently, assets are properly maintained, and downtime is minimized.
A work order is a formal document with information about the skills and tools needed to complete approved maintenance tasks. It tells you which employees have the authority to perform the requested items, what tasks the work order entails, and more.
Critical components of work order management include:
- Work Order Creation: This involves generating work orders based on maintenance needs, whether preventive, predictive, or reactive. Work orders will include detailed descriptions of the tasks, the assets involved, and the priority level.
- Scheduling: Once work orders are created, they must be scheduled appropriately to ensure timely execution. This includes allocating personnel, tools, and materials required to complete the tasks.
- Assignment: Assigning work orders to the right personnel is crucial for efficiency. This step ensures that tasks are given to technicians or teams with the necessary skills and availability.
- Tracking and Monitoring: It is important to track a work order’s progress throughout its lifecycle. This includes monitoring the status of the work, capturing any issues encountered, and ensuring that the work is completed within the expected time frame.
- Completion and Documentation: After the work order is completed, documenting the outcomes is vital for future reference and analysis. This includes recording any parts used, time spent, and any follow-up actions required.
- Reporting and Analysis: Effective work order management systems provide robust reporting and analytical capabilities. This allows organizations to identify trends, measure performance, and make data-driven decisions to improve maintenance processes.
Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is often used to streamline work order management. CMMS offers features like automated work order generation, real-time tracking, and comprehensive reporting tools, making managing and optimizing maintenance operations easier.
7 Tips for Success with Work Order Management
1. Classify Work Orders into Different Templates
To write comprehensive reports, you must decide what items belong in a work order form. A standard preventive maintenance checklist should have the following details:
- The requester’s contact information
- Description of the work to be done
- Location of the specified asset
- Estimated time for completion
- What parts and pieces will be used
Work order criteria include PM tasks, safety, inspection, repair, and emergency. For example, an electrical work order might involve inspecting the wiring of an apparatus whereas repair work orders could record the tools for restoring an industrial robot arm.
2. Use a CMMS for Work Order Management
A CMMS is a work order software that provides greater visibility into your maintenance management strategy and exemplifies an automated software solution for work orders. It lets you schedule regular maintenance activities and alert your team once the day arrives. From there, you can rate the priority level, inquire about spare parts and equipment, and attach images or videos to the request ticket.
A CMMS app will oversee the progress of tasks and notify you of which machines went down. It helps you track and build reports on how many hours were dedicated to work orders to understand the most efficient methods. Another feature is to generate invoices for capital expenses from a current vendor or manufacturer. It also makes data accessible through a quick search on the dashboard.
3. Report on Every Procedure in Depth
Obviously, you want your work order management system to be organized. Work orders should be stored with an asset’s other files to build up a maintenance history that identifies failure patterns. Along the same lines, give your technicians the information they need to succeed right there in your CMMS, whether it’s repair instructions for a specific machine or the manufacturer’s recommendations.
As the maintenance manager, you should create transparent procedures compliant with FDA and EPA regulations to pass a plant-wide audit with flying colors. Use remote devices to monitor those assets continuously and produce accurate reports. Among other criteria, each should show the exact dates, locations, and IDs of finished work orders.
4. Build Asset Criticality into your Work Order Management
Right after a work order gets released, categorize assets into separate priority types. This will save labor and material costs, so you aren’t spending excess resources on low-priority tasks baked into the routine. On the flip side, it’s risky to ignore safety-related work orders because that leads to hazardous operating environments.
The best policy is to determine the impact on productivity so that backlogs are prevented from piling up. During the work order analysis, check for abnormal maintenance KPIs in the core functionality like the mean time between failure (MTBF) to avoid closing with flawed reports.
5. Assess the Skills of Your Team
Work order management is not only about assigning tasks to your team, but also evaluating their strengths and weaknesses to select qualified personnel for the job. For each employee, focus on their technical skills, ranging from experience with heavy-duty equipment to knowledge of engineering principles.
Encourage them to specialize in certain areas so they will improve over time since this is a more practical approach than selecting them at random to deal with an emergency request.
6. Ditch the Pen and Paper
Trying to execute a work order management process by hand no longer makes sense given the size of modern organizations. Stuffing documents into a cabinet makes them harder to find, and paperwork is prone to human error — such that past records are not updated to reflect changing conditions. While spreadsheets are great for calculating simple formulas, you can’t easily convert those values into analytics or harmonize them with remote detectors. Implementing CMMS software is different because it streamlines work order management by providing admin capabilities to any user of the platform.
7. Add Descriptive Completion Notes
Closing a work order doesn’t mean your team never has to review it again. Even with PMs, you still have to weigh the risks of work against the benefits by factoring in the cost savings vs. time spent. Encourage your technicians to take notes on the root cause or the quality of work, and have them mark down additional problems for future investigations.
Work orders aim to gauge an asset’s condition and identify what parts are due for maintenance, so you have a reliable plan going forward. To build a successful work order management program, it’s important that you know how to respond to reactive, preventive, and predictive requests in a controlled setting. And that starts with employing the best practices of work order management.