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ROI CalculatorWork order management defines, assigns, tracks and bills all jobs or service contracts. This is essential to whether your maintenance operation runs smoothly and efficiently or descends into chaos. An effective work order system does not just track the repair tickets of the jobs completed. It eliminates backlogs, identifies hidden resources wasting time and money, ensures that the technician assigned to complete the repair or service requested does have the qualifications to do so, and enables management to convert their completed task into action containing performance metrics that can be used to plan for future work order assignments.
When all requests are designated as "urgent" the phrase becomes meaningless. Without objective prioritization processes being used by technicians, as a result of the technician's inability to distinguish between urgent requests versus routine service work, urgency doesn't exist in maintenance operations.
Missing failure codes, blank time entries and incomplete parts documentation turn work order data into unusable resources to perform trend analysis on the maintenance operation.
Work orders accumulate faster than they can be completed. A backlog averaging 4-6 weeks indicates there may be limited available resources and/or misaligned priorities. A chronic backlog increases the need for unscheduled maintenance.
Work orders will not connect with inventory management system and all parts that have been used will not be tracked as consumed and the rules that trigger reordering for parts will not be initiated, making stock outs extend MTTR. An integration between work orders and MRO inventory management is non-negotiable.
A large number of work orders to date have been made for repairs that are attempting to fix something that was not working instead of simply performing those repairs according to their planned preventive maintenance schedules. Since the schedule for performing PMs does not occur as originally planned, this indicates the operation has taken on a culture of putting out fires.
Priority 1: Immediate safety or production shutdown.
Priority 2: Significant production impact or regulatory risk.
Priority 3: Minor impact, schedule within 1 week.
Priority 4: Cosmetic or low-impact, schedule within 30 days.
Measures of backlog should consist of any open work orders that are older than two weeks. When the backlog exceeds this threshold, then capacity planning should be utilized to alleviate the backlog issue. A backlog that continues to grow will ultimately place technicians into a state of continual reactiveness.
There must be no manual creation of PMs. Any PM must be created automatically based upon a set of identifiable criteria such as calendar intervals, runtime hours, production cycles or meter readings. Automating the PM order creation process will ensure that once created, PMs cannot fall through the cracks.
Step-by-step procedures are vital for critical maintenance activities. Lockout procedures, torque specifications, testing protocols, safety permits and any other necessary steps should be embedded within the work order as a digital checklist. Compliance with checklists can cut the amount of rework in half and increase the safety incident rate.
When the technician completes a work order, the requestor receives an automatic notification with the resolution summary. Closed-loop communication improves the confidence of the requestor, decreases the number of duplicate requests, and makes service quality issues visible to the service provider when the resolution does not meet expectations.
