When Work Order Management Goes Wrong

Whether you call them work orders, job orders, maintenance jobs, services orders, cases or work slips, work orders are at the heart of facilities management.  

Getting work order management right is harder than you might think. Often it is the underlying problem to a number of different “symptoms” which create frustrations for facilities teams.

For many teams suffering the symptoms of poor work order management, a manual approach to the work order process could be the problem.

The manual work order process

A manual work order process relies on multiple disconnected reactive processes and manual intervention.

Manual work order processes often involve:

-             Facility users submitting requests through multiple channels – whether written or verbal

-             Maintenance requests being actioned on an ad hocbasis with no centralised triage

-             Planned maintenance relies on calendar remindersor mental notes

-             Work orders are physically printed and taken to jobs

-             Contractors are relied upon to keep plannedmaintenance on track

-             Maintenance histories are saved in filingcabinets or spreadsheets

Teams can get “stuck” in manual work order processes, knowing the process is inefficient but overwhelmed by the volume of work. At a certain point, the investment of time and effort to break the cycle feels out of reach for the team.

Ironically, the only way to improve this situation is to make that investment, and move on from manual processes.

Underlying problems with manual work order processes

Manual work order processes create multiple acute pain points for facilities teams, which can be linked back to a few fundamental problems.      

Limited visibility over works

Inherent in manual work order processes is a lack of visibility over works, whether reactive or planned/preventive. Without a centralised view of all works, it becomes difficult for facilities teams to make informed decisions around triaging work.

Amongst the team, a lack of visibility over works creates communication challenges. For example, being unable to see jobs in progress makes it difficult to respond to requester and stakeholder queries.

The lack of visibility over works can also create problems with managing team performance, and subsequent service delivery. Without a clear idea of what is going on, it is impossible to set meaningful benchmarks to then measure against.

Inaccessible asset data

Manual work order processes usually involve maintenance histories and asset data being saved in filing cabinets, or disparate spreadsheets. Updating these kinds of records requires manual intervention and relies upon strict compliance with the process.  

If this step is forgotten or neglected, asset and maintenance histories will be left incomplete. Where the records do exist, accessing information is an unnecessarily slow and complicated process. Without accessible, accurate information it’s impossible to make informed decisions about repair vs replacement.

This creates serious problems when it comes to reporting, compliance, and budgeting.

 Over-reliance on contractors

Contractors play a key role in the management of many facilities. Often, engaged to perform routine maintenance as required to comply with regulations, for example, testing of fire safety systems.

It is the responsibility of the facility to ensure works of this nature happen on the required schedule and to the required standard. However, in a manual work order management process, it can be easy to overlook this and rely on the assumption that contractors will meet agreed service levels.

At best, this leaves the organisation without auditable records of the work being completed. At work, the lack of visibility may mean that work isn’t being conducted, and the organisation is completely unaware.