An effective work order process is critical to streamlining maintenance tasks and achieving maintenance goals. Use these steps to define a scalable process.
Managing various facility management aspects is challenging, but having a robust work order process is critical. An efficient work order process helps streamline maintenance requests and makes reporting more manageable. But, how do you build such a process? Read on to learn more about how you can build the perfect work order process for your maintenance activities.
Understanding Work Orders
Work order is a documented request for repair and maintenance. They typically contain work items or tasks that need to be carried out by technicians to address the specific issue or maintenance objective. Maintenance managers typically create work orders based on maintenance requests or preventive maintenance schedules and assign them to one or more technicians. Work orders are crucial for technicians to get the job done and are critical for tracking, analyzing, and improving maintenance KPIs.
Building An Efficient Work Order Process
An efficient work order process helps track the lifecycle of the maintenance request. A well-structured work order process can significantly reduce the probability of errors or missing out on critical tasks.
Identification of Issue
For the most part, repair and maintenance are an outcome of unforeseen or unplanned downtime. Training employees to identify breakdowns and malfunctions in a piece of equipment is essential to reducing downtime and making the maintenance requests process quicker and efficient. An accurate and detailed maintenance request can help maintenance managers prioritize and assign work orders to the right technician.
Creating a Work Order
Work orders are vital documents for maintenance and repair tasks. They must include every information necessary for the technician to get the job done. A good work order document must have the following elements;
- Work Order Description helps provide a context for the problem. Ensure critical information such as how and when the problem occurred is included in the description. In addition, if you took action upon seeing the error, note that down.
- Type Of Issue – Categorizing the work order makes tracking and assigning work orders easier. Some examples include plumbing, electrical, cooling, or heating.
- Facility / Building / Location – if you have a large facility or manage multiple facilities, make sure to include the location of the equipment or the room. This information makes it easier for technicians to attend to the issue and is helpful for reporting purposes.
- Equipment – The work order must include a link or reference to the affected piece of equipment.
- Priority helps identify critical work orders and enables the maintenance team to decide what needs their immediate attention.
- Requester’s Name & Contact Details – it is essential that the maintenance team knows who filed the work order. The maintenance team might have additional questions to get the issue fixed.
- Images – Attaching relevant images to the work order can assist technicians in identifying and fixing the problem.
Assigning Work Orders
Assigning the work order to the right maintenance team or technician is crucial in the work order process. A work order system can help you automatically assign work orders to technicians based on their availability, skillset, location, and more.
Completion & Review
A work order must be closed by technicians once they have completed the tasks and addressed the underlying issue. The work order completion and review process is vital to improving compliance and reducing human errors. Here are a few things you can build into your work order completion process to improve accuracy and compliance:
Completion checklist: A checklist is a great way to improve compliance and simplify the auditing and review process.
Parts used: Recording parts and consumables used by technicians to execute the work order helps streamline parts inventory management and can help you track maintenance costs accurately.
Time tracking: Allowing technicians to log timesheets against work order tasks is an effective way to track maintenance costs and measure their performance.
Proof of completion: Enable technicians to capture images of the equipment or asset as proof of completion. You can also improve accountability by requiring technicians to sign work orders upon completion.
Conclusion
An effective work order process is critical to streamlining your maintenance activities and achieving your maintenance goals. The steps we’ve discussed above will put you on the right path towards defining a scalable work order process and improving compliance. At BriskForce, we offer robust mobile work order management solutions that can help improve your team’s productivity and simplify the work order process. Start a free trial today, or get in touch with us for more details.