The Best Work Order Management Strategies to Save You Time and Money

Work order management

Any employee can submit a formal request for repair, periodic maintenance, or general operations work that must be accomplished to keep core business operations rolling. A maintenance manager receives the request, reviews if the problem statement is clear and complete, adds any missing information or notes needed for carrying out the tasks effectively, assigns a technician to the work request, and stipulates a timeframe for execution of tasks. Now a work request becomes work order. Work order management is the organized approach of estimating, tracking the progress of work orders through completion, reviewing and endorsing the work done.

Save reporting time

Time is a valuable and non-renewable resource for everyone in the organization.  Let them spend it on productive tasks and not on unplanned maintenance chores or sudden breakdowns wastefully. An area where everyone in the chain of command of maintenance managers spends a lot of time is reporting. The usage of paper files or excel spreadsheets to manage maintenance is outdated, and ineffective. It complicates reporting, which a CMMS system does automatically in the background.

Eliminate costly breakdowns

A digital work order management system is needed to keep the maintenance teams organized and energized. Use a Computerized Maintenance Management Software(CMMS) to automate Planned Preventive Maintenance schedules. Recall the proverb “A stitch in time saves nine”. Habitualize preventive maintenance to reduce sudden emergency breakdowns that cause costly repairs and production losses. We also need to understand that the software is as good as the person using it.

Real–time work visibility

Prioritization of work is important. Attach priority flags for technicians to attend and fix issues with assets of high business value first. Set push, in-app, and email notifications to inform techs on task assignments.  Before assigning the workforce tasks, line supervisors must be conscious of the work progress and current workload of each tech in real-time. A CMMS helps showcase the big picture of maintenance work across locations and indicates the real-time workload of all techs. It is essential to improve technician response times.

Instant access to information

One of the main reasons staff leave workorders midway is the lack of access to necessary information such as the history of previous maintenance, user manuals, troubleshooting guides, etc. With a CMMS, create work orders attaching all necessary documents with clear work instructions accessible via smart devices. Information on work orders resides safely in cloud servers.

Work Log to tweak operations

A retrospection of work orders done in the past is essential to improve the amount of time spent performing the work. Analyse closed or reworked work orders to reveal valuable insights into processes and systems to fine-tune the operations. Maintaining a work order log physically is tedious. Hence entrust the task to a cloud-based CMMS. It will place facility managers in a better position to ensure common issues do not arise repetitively.

Instant service request submission

Maintenance expenses are optimized when the CMMS system makes it simple for the first onlooker of a defect or failure to bring it to the notice of the facility manager. It is possible with a mobile scan of the QR code scan pasted on the asset. The system is special in that it allows one to submit requests even if the asset details are unknown to the observer of the defect and he/she is not a registered user of the application.

Best work assignment

Upon receiving the request, the application can auto-assign it to the concerned department technicians. Auto assignment can be done based on asset-technician mapping so that it is assigned to the best technician or to the person with prior experience in servicing the specific asset make and model.

Reusable knowledge of fixes

A CMMS with a practical approach to problem-solving should also provide a knowledge base containing the knowledge of seniors on fixes. The information must be easily accessible by techs on the field. Access to knowledge bank improves the First Time Fix Rates and maintenance expenses.

Quick & Accurate Audits

In case a resolved issue shows up again, further correspondence shall be made in the same work order. This makes it easy to gather all the information for audits. The application can also automate the workflows for the approval process. Each work order shall prominently feature the list of approvers and technicians who worked on it, for audits at lightning speeds. It makes it easy to remedy any mistakes or ineffective actions in the past which helps save a great deal of time and money.  The CMMS system notifies relevant stakeholders on every work order communication. It also helps avoid duplicate, unauthorized work, and miscommunication.

Save time & money at peak workloads

To top it all, manual tracking of work orders may work as expected when the volume of work orders is low. But it will miserably fail as the business grows, making the maintenance managers and business leaders feel the heat and burden. End  maintenance management worries about prolonging turn around time and unchecked expenses with powerful workflows that never let you down.