Work orders are an essential maintenance management tool. Work orders are formal requests for team members to complete specific maintenance tasks such as routine maintenance, repairs, or preventive maintenance inspections. Typically, a work order will contain all relevant information for completing corresponding tasks including:
- Instructions for carrying out the work
- Details on the assets being serviced
- Projected timeline for completion
- Delegation of the proper personnel to supervise and complete the task
- An index of required resources including the tools, parts, and raw materials needed to complete the work correctly
- Visual aids such as photos, schematics, or diagrams that might support completion of the work
Your technicians require a streamlined maintenance work order system to carry out their work effectively and efficiently.
Why are work orders important?
Work orders facilitate the initiation and completion of maintenance tasks by detailing the scope of work, delegating technicians, identifying necessary tools, and laying out timeframes. Most important of all, work orders are critical to facilitating a strategic maintenance workflow.
In an efficiently run organization, work orders will be used by personnel from various departments and at several levels of leadership to facilitate, oversee, and complete maintenance work. Impacted stakeholders include the production and operations personnel who initiate work requests, the facility management personnel who are responsible for authorizing the requested work, the maintenance technicians who carry out the requested tasks, and the personnel who will ultimately review the completed work.
A properly detailed and formatted work order:
- Conveys vital information across teams, departments, facilities, and job sites
- Establishes an audit trail for all maintenance activities, procedures, and outcomes
- Creates accountability for those who are charged with carrying out and supervising all aspects of the work order
- Provides a clear sequence of events that ultimately make it possible to track maintenance tasks from the initiation of a work request to the completion of requested work
Maintenance teams rely on work orders to assign, manage, and document their work, and to ensure that this work is completed effectively, efficiently, and on time. The following guide takes a closer look at the importance of work orders to your maintenance program and highlights some of the features your organization should seek in your work order software solution.
What is work order management software?
Work order management software refers to any solution designed to digitize, optimize, and streamline the process for managing work orders.
These process improvements can yield measurable improvements in the performance of your maintenance operations including a lower frequency and severity of equipment failures, reduced downtime, and a longer lifespan for your critical assets. The right work order management software will play a number of important roles in streamlining and optimizing the work order management process including:
- Generating automated work orders based on new and active maintenance requests, in correspondence with preventive maintenance scheduling, or when triggered by real-time performance data
- Centralizing work order management through a single, user-friendly system that creates and controls access for maintenance team members and other relevant stakeholders
- Offering mobile access so that technicians can access, update, and complete work orders on-site or remotely using their mobile devices
- Enabling task prioritization based on urgency, asset criticality, and the availability of required resources
- Assigning work orders to technicians based on relevant skill sets, availability, and proximity to the job site
- Tracking work order status in real time with automated updates on progress toward as well as details on pending tasks and potential sources of delay or obstacles to completion
- Documenting work order history including asset maintenance history, task performance, and associated costs, as well as reports on key metrics like task completion times, technician productivity, and asset downtime
- Integrating with other enterprise systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems), or asset tracking software
How do maintenance teams use work order software?
Maintenance teams are responsible for a wide range of tasks and responsibilities including day-to-day equipment maintenance, seasonal servicing of building systems, emergency repairs, and periodic facilities inspections. These same teams must often manage a host of routine preventive maintenance tasks including testing, cleaning, calibrating, and lubricating equipment.
In addition, maintenance personnel are typically required to handle a number of administrative duties like completing compliance checklists, tracking work orders, and fielding a near-constant barrage of incoming service requests. For large enterprises in asset-intensive industries, it would be difficult (if not impossible) to manage these responsibilities without the help of software.
Work order software for maintenance teams makes it possible to manage all of these tasks through a single user-friendly dashboard. Moreover, the best of these software solutions can actually integrate these important work order management tasks with other critical aspects of your operation.
This is why maintenance teams rely on work order management software for a variety of important day-to-day functions including:
- Creating and assigning detailed work requests for tasks such as repairs, inspections, or routine maintenance
- Accessing, logging, and updating assigned work orders in real time with user-friendly dashboards
- Automating preventive maintenance scheduling and work order generation based on asset performance data, usage, or preset time intervals
- Generating and prioritizing urgent work orders so that technicians can rapid response in the event of an emergency
- Integrating with asset tracking systems to monitor the condition, maintenance history, and location of critical equipment
- Prioritizing and scheduling maintenance tasks based on urgency, asset criticality, or operational impact
- Merging with inventory management systems and allowing maintenance teams to track the availability of spare parts, monitor stock levels and coordinate inventory decisions with new work requests
- Tacking maintenance performance metrics including work order completion times, technician performance, asset downtime, and repair costs
- Maintaining detailed records of all completed tasks, including the names of technicians and managers who performed and supervised the work as well as key dates (i.e. work request date, date of completion, etc.) and a detailed listing of all materials and consumables used to complete the work
Benefits of using work order software in maintenance management
In order to unlock the fuller benefits of a software-based work order management system, many organizations will choose solutions that offer a high level of automation as well as seamless integration with other software in their tech stack. This is why many organizations will choose to implement an advanced CMMS software.
Limble’s industry leading CMMS integrates work order management with other critical processes like asset management, inventory management, and preventive maintenance scheduling.
While your maintenance management team will take a lead role in leveraging your work order software, the right solution will put your maintenance program in a position to produce organization-wide benefits such as:
- Time savings through automated workflows, streamlined task assignment and cloud-based mobile access
- Cost savings through more accurate budgeting and forecasting, optimized resource allocation, reduced downtime and improved asset lifespan
- Proactive maintenance management through data-driven work order prioritization, routine preventative maintenance servicing, and integration with predictive maintenance tools such as IoT sensors
- Data-driven decision-making, powered by deeper analytical visibility into asset performance, maintenance costs, technician performance, and downtime
- Improved compliance preparation thanks to compliance checklists, automated audit trails, and detailed maintenance records
- Asset lifecycle tracking, from procurement to decommissioning, including each asset’s complete maintenance history, total cost of ownership, and current health, usage, and warranty status
- Streamlined inventory management, ensuring that maintenance teams can identify, locate, and leverage the parts and materials required for task completion, within the timeframe requested
- Improved ratio of proactive versus reactive maintenance activities, and consequently improved maintenance costs, outcomes, and accountability
Why is Limble the best maintenance software for work order management?
Limble stands out in a crowded CMMS marketplace for providing a work order management system that integrates with customers’ broader maintenance management strategies. The result is a work order process that supports important operational priorities and maintenance functions to ultimately improve your production team’s efficiency, maximize the performance of your maintenance technicians, reduce equipment downtime, and improve your organization’s profitability as a whole.
With Limble’s work order management software, your maintenance team can:
- Track all open and historical work orders to ensure full compliance and provide complete visibility into tasks at the individual staff level
- Create work orders with just a scan and easily add all the relevant details
- Leverage default work order templates or create your own based on your organization’s workflow and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
- Customize work order workflows to match the unique needs of your organization including setting up approval processes, defining task priorities, and creating custom fields for tracking asset-specific details
- Monitor the progress of each task in real-time, view updates from technicians in the field, and adjust task priorities as needed
- Leverage in-depth analytics on work order completion rates, technician performance, asset downtime, and maintenance costs, and view customizable reports on key metrics
- Automatically assign work orders and connect digital work order records to related assets and parts for a more complete picture of the open tasks on your checklist
- Configure notifications to alert your maintenance technicians about pending work orders and approaching deadlines
- Integrate with asset tracking and maintenance management features, allowing work orders to be linked directly to specific assets as well as to corresponding maintenance history and ongoing updates
- Sort and prioritize work requests by asset criticality, technician availability, location, and more
- Use drag and drop calendars to manage tasks, change due dates, or reassign technicians
- Schedule repeatable preventive maintenance tasks, either from templates or from scratch, in order to preempt breakdowns, reduce unplanned maintenance work, and lower repair costs
- Set up a self-serve work request portal to simplify the process of submitting an on-site or remote work request to your maintenance team
See Limble’s work order management features in action
Ultimately, Limble’s award-winning CMMS software combines the valuable features listed above with:
- An intuitive interface, user-friendly dashboard, and compatibility with most mobile devices
- Customizable task workflows, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), data-driven reporting, and asset tracking
- Integrations with a range of enterprise management and accounting systems
- Automated notifications for a variety of maintenance management activities including inventory reorder triggers, emergency work requests, and scheduled equipment inspections
- A powerful, cloud-based mobile app that gives field technicians access to work orders, as well as the ability to log data, and update tasks in real time
- Proactive maintenance strategies including advanced scheduling tools for preventive and predictive maintenance
- Advanced data analytics to help maintenance managers track performance, identify bottlenecks, and evaluate workflows
- Comprehensive reporting filled with accessible and actionable insights on how to optimize performance and enhance outcomes
- Improved collaboration and communication between team members through centralized access to work orders, updates, and asset data
Check out our product tour today and find out for yourself what Limble’s powerful work order management software can do to streamline, simplify and enhance your maintenance program.
