6 Steps to Optimize Your Work Order Management Process

With more than half of U.S. public school districts in need of updating or replacing equipment in their facilities, school maintenance teams can expect to spend a lot of time dealing with breakdowns, malfunctions, and outages in the coming years. And when those maintenance tasks start piling up, effective work order management could be the only thing that stands between your maintenance team and complete chaos.

Essential Elements of a Service/Repair Work Order

The primary purpose of a work order is to give an overview of a maintenance service request and the workflow that a technician will need to follow. It usually has multiple sections, including:

• A task description that explains what work the technician will perform
• A priority level that identifies how urgent the work is
• The scope of work that describes the extent of the issue
• The names of workers assigned to the task
• The expected outcome of the repairs
• An estimated completion date for the work

In the past, maintenance teams often wrote this information by hand and saved it in spreadsheets. Today, many organizations use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to generate, categorize, and store their work orders. CMMS software simplifies facilities management and makes your work order process more consistent.

Types of Work Orders

There are several different kinds of work orders that you can use with your CMMS software. Some of the most common include:

• Standard Work Order: This type of work order is generally for non-emergency tasks that don’t qualify as routine maintenance activities, such as setting up a new piece of equipment.
• Emergency Work Order: An emergency work order is part of reactive maintenance, where something breaks down and needs immediate repairs.
• Preventive Maintenance Work Order: Maintenance departments use this work order for tasks that occur on a regular schedule, such as changing filters.
• Inspection Work Order: Rather than instructing maintenance technicians to perform a repair, an inspection work order directs them to audit and evaluate the condition of an asset.
• Corrective Maintenance Work Order: If a technician discovers a problem while performing an inspection or routine maintenance, they generate a corrective maintenance work order to address the issue before it becomes a bigger problem.

Because it allows you to collect and track data and schedule maintenance in advance, a work order management system is useful whether you’re focused on work orders for preventive vs. predictive maintenance.

Benefits of Streamlining Work Orders

Students, teachers, and administrators all benefit in the long run when facilities managers streamline their work order processes. Advantages include:

• Increased productivity: Even one failing piece of equipment can put a strain on a school. A solid maintenance strategy gets assets and equipment back online quickly, so everyone can get back to their work or studies.
• Significant cost savings: Experiencing equipment downtime, buying new equipment to replace broken assets, and wasting maintenance technician time can strain a facilities management budget. A strategic approach to work orders and asset management cuts back on those problems and, in turn, saves money.
• Maintained regulatory compliance: Some equipment malfunctions pose a threat to the health of students or staff. Using work order management software to keep up with maintenance activities, such as the tasks on a playground inspection checklist, helps ensure that you consistently meet legal requirements for facility safety.

When you improve your work order process, you create an environment that promotes health and learning, both of which support better student outcomes.

The Six-Step Work Order Management Process

The following six steps are essential for maintaining efficient maintenance task completion. Using a standardized work order management system will help you avoid common pitfalls that create safety, budgetary, and regulatory complications for facilities managers, but if you don’t have such a system in place yet, using a work order checklist can help, too.

Step 1: Task Identification

The first stage of the work order management process is identifying an issue that needs resolution. In some cases, this will be a planned identification, where the maintenance department generates work orders for tasks that they know they’ll have to complete. This might include routine inspections or maintenance, such as checking fluid levels.

Unplanned identifications occur when others within the school system notice that an asset, system, or piece of equipment has broken down or experiences a malfunction. For example, if the HVAC system abruptly stops working, a school administrator would make an unplanned identification and ask for assistance from the maintenance department.

Step 2: New Work Order Submission

When an issue is first noticed, a maintenance request should be submitted using one standard submission process. Using a centrally accessible and templatized form, users should fill in required form fields to detail the issue, including problem area (electrical, plumbing, heating, etc.); location; specific assets/equipment effected; contact person; and relevant images, if any.

Submitting digital maintenance requests using work order management software allows users to collect essential details, present them clearly, and ensure that all submissions are routed to a single, approved location.

Step 3: Evaluation, Prioritization & Assignment

Rather than working tickets as they come in, you can reduce ticket times by evaluating and prioritizing tickets upon receipt. Of course, issues that may present a safety hazard or result in the school temporarily closing should always receive immediate attention. Beyond this, though, you can evaluate tickets based on anticipated resolution times and team capacities, and schedule work accordingly.

While it’s possible to take a manual approach to prioritization and work order assignments, an automated maintenance program that handles work order creation and prioritization is far more efficient. It determines priority levels based on the type of request and uses a set of pre-determined criteria to route tasks to the appropriate person or department. The result: your department can complete work orders as promptly as possible and avoid a ticket backlog.

Step 4: Work Order Effort & Task Completion

With their work orders in hand, your maintenance team can get started. They’ll review all the information included in the order, collect any necessary tools or equipment, and proceed to the site to get to work on resolving the issue.

Providing technicians with historical data allows them to complete their work quickly and avoid repeating any previous mistakes. For instance, if the maintenance department has repaired an air conditioning unit multiple times, their work order should include information about what happened in the past and what they should look at now. This allows them to achieve the best possible repairs in the shortest amount of time.

Step 5: Work Order Documentation & Ticket Closure

Even once a task is done, the work order isn’t complete until the responding technician updates it with notes about the repair and officially closes it out. In their ticket update, they should include details about the work performed, add images that show the repair process and results, and provide a final status on the equipment post-repair.

This information proves that they performed the work properly and assists other maintenance team members when performing additional repairs in the future. After inserting this information, the technician closes out the ticket to show that the work is finished.

Step 6: Ticket Review and Follow-Up

Closed work orders contain useful information that managers can use to refine their maintenance processes and strengthen their teams. They provide insights into possible issues with safety and efficiency and allow maintenance departments to ensure that all technicians are meeting their goals and following procedures correctly.

Once tickets are marked complete, maintenance managers should review them, focusing on metrics such as:

• Time spent on the repair
• Repair processes used
• Total time between request submission and work completion dates
• Concerns about the condition of equipment or assets

Ticket analytics dashboards allow you to optimize your maintenance operations so that you can meet your key performance indicators (KPIs) by minimizing downtime, cutting costs, and shortening resolution times.

Maintenance Work Order Process: Best Practices

Facilities and maintenance managers have individual approach to work orders based on the size of their team and structure of their department. However, when you implement a new work order process — or adjust the process you already have in place — these practices will increase your chances of success.

Use Templates for New Work Order Creation

Templatized work order request forms save significant time and guarantee that your maintenance team has access to everything they need each time they receive a work order.

Define Team Roles and Responsibilities

Identify your maintenance team members’ individual strengths and assign them tasks that they naturally do well in. Your team will feel confident in their roles and complete tasks quickly.

Use Software Automation to Track Work Order Life Cycles

Digital work order management systems, like Incident IQ, allow you to monitor work order life cycles, enabling work order prioritization and assignment as well as providing key data on team performance. Schedule a demo to see how Incident IQ’s ticketing software enables you to view bottlenecks or repeated issues over time.

Use Mobile Devices for On-the-Go Ticket Updates

Empower teams to get real-time ticket notifications and keep projects updated in the moment with CMMS software that works from their mobile devices. With integrations for Android or iOS, Incident IQ mobile allows users to view the details of their assignments, update ticket statuses, maintain communication, and perform repairs correctly.

Select a Work Order Management Software to Maintain Work Order Process Compliance

Confirming that your maintenance team members are following the processes, goals, and standards your department has set is vital to keeping everyone safe and productive. While reviewing and managing work orders, look closely at each technician’s notes to make sure that they’re completing repairs in the way that they should.

In addition, look for warning signs, such as if they’re struggling to stick to planned maintenance schedules. This could indicate that you need to revise your processes or provide your team with more training. By using the right software and optimizing your work order process, you can lower your facilities management costs and make your team more efficient.