Processes directly related to maintenance tasks and maintenance work requests are a part of the working routine of any company or business.

That is because any machine or new equipment can stop working, breaking a team’s or the entire company's workflow. So, often, the maintenance team of your company sends maintenance technicians to deal with some of the maintenance tasks of the highest priority.

This is where the work order comes in. The maintenance manager will prepare it before allowing any of maintenance technicians to start the maintenance operation. No matter the work requested, creating a maintenance work order is the first step of the workflow.

A work order is a document that is digitally created, printed, or made by hand. The work order brings all the relevant information about any maintenance task demanded by customers or any other business member and staff. 

It also serves to track completed work. All the data it presents guides the maintenance team and ensures that specific maintenance tasks are correctly completed. Without such a document, there will be no scheduled work.

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The difference between a worker order (WO) and a Maintenance Work Request or Work Order Request can be confusing, so we must elucidate it before going on. Maintenance Work Orders are the documents that the maintenance manager generally releases to the team, containing all necessary maintenance tasks with all the essential related information. 

On the other hand, Maintenance Work Requests are the documents sent to the maintenance team by customers and co-workers asking for maintenance tasks.  Managers receive these requests, containing all the important data, complete them with the necessary observations, and assign them to any of the maintenance teams. This is when Maintenance Work Requests are turned into maintenance Work Orders. Both are a part of the work order management process.

As mentioned before, a perfect work order must have all the necessary details related to the task so the problem can be managed properly. This means that the maintenance team member must be well-informed. 

Some examples are what to do, where to go, which part of the equipment is malfunctioning, what pieces he must take with him, the asset history, if there was human error, the completion date, and all the purchase orders. And he must be able to track all of these important details easily, so he has the right tools and materials to perform the maintenance job.

There are different types of work orders, and their format will depend on the company. There isn’t a unique pre-established model to follow, but there is a list of necessary details you must consider. Many organizations divide their work orders into something close to eight to sixteen different sections, depending on the multiple tasks and the maintenance metrics. 

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After you find a suitable format for your maintenance work orders, you can save time by getting it as a template. You can save Maintenance Work Order Templates in one platform of your business, a centralized system, or a central location for this kind of data. One example is a computerized maintenance management system, the CMMS software, which helps with routine maintenance. The essential part is that it must facilitate future work while keeping track of the maintenance operation and simultaneously reduce the time spent on the job.

Dividing the Work order into Concise Data Sections

We explained the importance of details and the format of maintenance work orders. Now it's time to talk deeply about each section you can create and what kind of information you must add to it. 

Work Request and Work order Responsibles

The first thing any work order must contain is the person who made the work request and the manager that approved and turned the request into a work order. It may not seem necessary for a small business with one or few maintenance teams or supervisors. Still, when you have a lot of people working in maintenance and approving different work orders, this helps distinguishes each job.

Job Description

The second thing you want to put on your work order forms is a complete description of the job about to be performed by the technician. This description will vary depending on the jobs the work order includes. A statement may be enough for simple maintenance jobs, but a complete description explaining the problem might be necessary for other complicated maintenance tasks.

To keep the maintenance work order document as precise as possible, you must describe some facts. The first is what happened right when the machine or tools started failing. The second may be any strange sound or smell perceived. The third is if the problem directly affects other parts of the machine or other tools.

Complete Description of the Asset and Location

Certain assets are expected in a company. Imagine if you have an office full of computers. The order “fix a computer in the office” is far from enough to determine which computer is broken down. Your work order must be descriptive enough for the maintenance technician to identify which asset needs repair. This information must come in the work request for the work order process to happen. Often, you will have a paper trail indicating the technicians all the problems and necessary operations.

To solve this problem, certain assets may include serial numbers or Ids, making it far easier for the technician to find them and perform the proper work order management. This becomes crucial when discussing emergency work orders or jobs with the highest priority.

The Technician or the Team Members Performing the Task

This is not hard to comprehend. One of the things you must have on your paper records every time a new work order comes in is what team members will manage the problem. When many work order operations are happening or are scheduled for a short time, it is essential to know which person is responsible for the repairs of the different assets.

The function of a good maintenance planner is to ensure your personnel can deal with all the Work requests and have all the processes completed as efficiently as possible, no matter how many hours it will take to manage work orders.

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Completion Date

Another self-explanatory section you may add to your work order process. Well, far more than the beginning and the end date of the work order management, it will be interesting for those managing work orders to place the full schedule of the work order process.

You can even specify hours, depending on the work order task. Many maintenance workers have more than one task to complete in a day of work. So, establishing hours can help them set priorities. 

Priority Level

Since we mentioned priority in the last section, why not talk more about it now? Each task’s priority must be precise in a perfect work order. This is hardly something that a person will specify in the work requests. Generally, this job falls into the manager’s hands and is established based on the importance of the broken tools or system for completing different tasks. Setting a priority line becomes crucial for work order management during emergency situations.

Materials and Necessary Parts

Since we are talking about maintenance work orders, it's common for many systems and machines to start presenting problems in pieces or specific parts. This means that efficient work order planning details all the necessary parts and components that need repair. 

That way, the technician assigned to the maintenance service can already go with the new parts he will need to change or be aware of any management differences he will have to deal with to finish the operation correctly. 

Problems with PC or mobile devices often demand the work to be done manually. In these cases, what is already hard becomes even more challenging if the work order doesn’t bring such specifications. Besides that, materials may indicate extra charges the team must make, so they are crucial things that a maintenance planner must keep in mind.

Images and Videos

Another complementary piece of information that can benefit the work request and the entire work order completion process is the addition of images and videos. They won’t be added every time, but only when they make sense.

These images can bring visual data about the service and the resources technicians must deal with. If a vital functionality, installation, or anything else fails, videos or pictures of the system may help technicians overcome the challenge easier.

Final Notes

This is the final space for your maintenance work order. Here, you will add any other helpful information not placed in different sections of your work order. Instructions or observations that can make technicians end the process efficiently. You can maintain this section blank if you don’t have a word to say to help with the repair. Just keep in mind that some technicians will like some instructions.

Whether you use CMMS software or manage your work orders manually, you will have to work with different work orders in most cases. Work orders for Preventive Maintenance, inspection, emergency, and corrective maintenance are the most common. 

The types of Work Orders may change depending on several factors related to the company you work for. These factors include regulatory compliance, company size, company service or clients, and many other things. Look at some of the work orders you may have to manage.

General Work Order

These are common types of tasks that can’t be classified as one of the other types of maintenance. This means it is no emergency, inspection, or preventative maintenance. They are more like those scheduled routine maintenance types of equipment may need. Some services you need to perform with efficiency include setting up new equipment or removing out-of-use systems or equipment.

Preventive Maintenance Work Order

As the name goes, preventative maintenance works to prevent any problem with a system, equipment, or other assets. Asset failure can mean several costs or fatal breaks in the workflow. Both are situations any company doesn’t want to face. Preventive maintenance can be easily divided into two types of care: reactive and preventative.

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Inspection Work Order

This particular work order allows technicians to audit or inspect the assigned assets. These types of paper records are far more related to preventive maintenance. They can but not necessarily result from a work request, as inspections of certain materials or systems are often pre-scheduled on a specific date. 

After some time spent on such a task, technicians may submit a request, so new work orders can be authorized to enter into the schedule to prevent future problems with assets. These tasks bring several benefits and are a vital part of avoiding problems before they appear. With that, a business can avoid several costs, which is necessary, especially for businesses running low on money.

Corrective Maintenance Work Order

This type of maintenance order comes directly from the inspection work order. While technicians perform preventive maintenance on schedule and inspecting equipment, software, and other resources, they can create a new work request. Such a request will become the corrective work order.

After the problem is identified, corrective maintenance comes in to isolate and solve it. That way, the software or other asset comes back to full performance before something worse happens. It is different from the Emergency work order because managers will be scheduling them since the failure in the asset was identified in proper time. They must be done but aren’t an emergency situation.

Emergency Work Order

Preventive maintenance is undoubtedly important. But sometimes, it is not enough to find or identify a problem with an asset. It can happen that these assets or systems mean a severe breakdown in the work line. Emergency work orders are assigned to fill the gap and ensure all emergencies the preventive maintenance can’t find are appropriately managed.

Of course that technicians performing such work orders must be fast and as efficient as possible. There will be no planning or schedule here. When “the bomb explodes,” it must be managed quickly since the more time it takes for the task to be performed, the longer the work won’t be done. Often, it means a lot of money lost. For some assets or specific software, staying broken for a long period may result in bigger costs to finally come to full performance again.

After all that, you already understand everything you need to include to ensure you create the best work order and the different work orders you may have to prepare. For now, we are about to elucidate the lifecycle of a work order. 

The work order lifecycle has three different main phases, which are divided into Creation, Completion, and Recording. These three main phases, for their time, can be broken into six different steps that englobe from its creation to its end. The steps are

• Tasks Identification
• Work Order Request
• Work Order Scheduling
• Assign and complete the Work Order
• Closing and documenting the work order specific characteristics
• Analyzing the work order details to ensure more efficiency when completing new demands

Depending on the company and the work order management you work with, you may see that work orders can come in one of two ways. One is digital work orders. The other is paper work orders. Even though digital work orders are more efficient and have more benefits, they are not as commonly used as they could be. Besides that, the work order management process may change depending on what you decide to use.

Digital Work Orders facilitate all the processes behind the work order progress completion. Having software or sharing such a form through digital ways makes the whole process faster. The laborer can access it from anywhere and check all the necessary management information without meeting the managers. Besides, you can use several work order templates to ensure the work order is wholly organized, making it easy to find key information and make necessary changes in real time. 

Besides that, any technician will have direct access to all the digital work orders they need at any time. With a paper form and without great levels of the organization, you won’t be able to access it as the paper will probably become trash after the work order is completed. 

Apart from the facility, keeping paper has a cost and takes up a lot of space. After performing and dealing with work order management, you will need more cabinets to store all the work orders you worked on. Another of the benefits you have is that, if you rely on one unique software for your work orders, there will be no need for physical space to store any paper.

To complete, besides using templates, digital work orders allow you to establish and add specific metrics to your work orders, which will improve the whole work process. With templates and specific metrics of request evaluations,  management of work orders become faster and easier, with more request being answered than they would be using paper.

There are some practices you can have to make it better for you to create and manage several work orders. Such improvement in your management will give your team bigger access to important information, avoid any process failure, and result in faster task completion.

Create a Standardized Process for Work Orders

It's not because there are several types of work orders that they should be made differently. Reaching the managers and creating work orders in different ways will confuse the whole management and lead to data loss. That’s why you neeed to create a standardized process for co-workers to make work requests. 

All of them must follow the same steps when creating requests that will become work orders. All the data requirements must be met, too. Another important thing is to ensure that, after you assign the technician, he will perform only the key steps established on the records.

The Bigger the Data, the Better

Another critical thing is to ensure that all the necessary information is displayed in the work order. Many managers may fear being excessive or tend to trust their technicians’ skills but templates and specific metrics are not helpful if they don’t respect the list of the information we have already mentioned.

The maintenance workers will only be completely aware of what they need to do and put their skills to good use with the correct information about the asset and the whole process. A lack of data can lead to more asset problems and delay the work order completion.

Summarize With Checklists

One of the most important practices is using checklists to ensure your co-workers will follow all the necessary steps. It will drastically decrease the probability of human error, making the entire maintenance process as accurate as possible.

Classify the Work Orders by Their Importance

In big companies, where the maintenance managers have several work requests, prioritizing the demands is fundamental. You need to understand which asset is more important for the company’s project to follow as it should. After that, you must start fixing these crucial assets.

Microsoft Office Suite is the best package of applications for you to create and manage your work orders. With programs such as Word and Excel, you have the freedom to manipulate and customize your whole documents to better fit all the necessities of your work orders. Apart from that, they are perfect for storing and finding huge pieces of information.

To make your work even faster, both platforms have several online and free templates for you to take advantage of when creating your work orders. They are also intuitive, easy to use, and can be accessed from multiple devices, facilitating even more maintenance teamwork. 

But besides all the technical features Word and Excel offer their users, they are perfect because by using them, you can universalize all the processes and projects of your business. After all, Word and Excel allow you to do practically anything, making them a must-have for all companies. So, far more than work orders, you have infinite possibilities with them.

You can get several different work order templates for both Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Some of the templates are

Property Maintenance Work Order

Get this template

This is a property maintenance work order template. Inside it, you will find small blocks of information containing contractor, payment, client, and schedule informations. Below it, other tables for service details and necessary materials.

Maintenance Request and Work Order

Get this template

This other great template is the Maintenance Request and Work Order, which, as the name goes, let you put the work request and word order at the same document. You have big blocks to place information of the problems identified, all the information, and everything that happened during the work order execution.

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With all that, you know all you need to create the best and most complete work orders that will make your maintenance crew, co-workers, or customers proud. Problems with different assets are common in a business routine, and that’s why knowing all we teach in this article about work orders is extremely important. Making the process faster will ensure your business stays on the trail even with the common malfunctions we all have to deal with.

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