Work Order Management: 10 Tips & Best Practices | Q Ware CMMS

Work order management is the art of creating, prioritizing, and assigning work to effectively maintain facilities and assets. As facilities expand and the number of maintainable assets and requesting occupants grows, it becomes more important to maintain organization and clear work processes so tasks get done when needed. When maintenance teams are expected to do more with less resources, it can be tricky to hold everything together. The rest of this post covers 10 tips and best practices to help with work order management.

This is the most important best practice for proper work order management. It's easy to jump from job to job as problems pop up around your facilities. It takes discipline to make sure only documented work requests get your teams attention. Without proper documentation of work, you miss out on all that data that will help you manage work orders effectively. You'll find it difficult to answer the following questions:

• What is the typical work load from month to month?
• What is the bandwidth of each employee?
• How many employees should be scheduled to meet the load?
• How was the work completed?
• How long did the work take to complete?
• Was the work done satisfactorily?

Many of these questions can be answered with pure intuition and experience but it doesn't hurt to have the data to backup your notions. The flip side of this tip is to make sure facility occupants understand the proper way to ask for assistance. If there is a designated email to send requests to or a work order management application that allows them to submit requests, let them know what the approved methods are to get your attention.

All kinds of requests are submitted each day and they can range from ones needing immediate attention to ones that are just outright ridiculous. You're the best gatekeeper when it comes to prioritizing work for your team and it's important to come up criteria for a prioritization schema. A prioritization schema can be as simple as low, medium, and high or it can be more specific. The important thing is to make sure your team understands what takes priority for the day, what order tasks should be worked on, and what can be put on the back burner. 

A proper workflow establishes the lifecycle of work orders from the time they are created to when they are closed or completed. In work order management software, this typically takes the form of assigning work order statuses. An example would be the status progression of a request from "New", to "In Progress", to "Completed", to "Closed". Segmenting work in this way makes it easy to know what is currently being worked on and helps calculate certain key performance indicators (KPI's) such as average first response time, average time to complete or mean time to repair (MTTR), and the total work orders completed within a specific timeframe. 

While the absolute value of time to complete/time to repair isn't exactly indicative of performance, using it as a benchmark to measure improvement is essential. The goal is to reduce asset downtimes and respond to occupant requests as quickly as possible. This metric will show you how well your team is progressing over time. It also helps to provide an outlet for occupant feedback after requests are completed. You should see a correlation between time to complete and requester satisfaction. Keeping your finger on the pulse of these metrics helps to gauge the effectiveness of your work order management strategy.

There is only so much your team can handle at any given time. It's better to feed them new work as they have the capacity rather than assign all you can. Managing work orders in this way prevents your team from feeling overwhelmed and a growing backlog of deferred work requests could be used as a justification for additional support. 

Along the same lines as not overloading your team, you don't want to defer more than needed. Neglecting preventive work isn't the best strategy and it's important to pull in these deferred tasks whenever your team has the capacity. Deferring occupant requests for too long is equally troublesome. When customer service is bad, it's not good for anyone involved and reflects poor work order management practices. It can help to set a reasonable allowed timeframe for work to be deferred. For instance, anything that has been deferred for over a week might rise to the top of the priority list.

If your facilities are highly regulated or you have building certifications to maintain, schedule work orders to keep up with compliance requirements. It helps to pre-assign these tasks with a unique priority to make them stand out in work order queues. These tasks might not be urgent but having them documented and in the queue will ensure they don't get lost. Work order management software makes compliance easier by providing a history of work performed as well as individual updates made to requests.

Preventive maintenance is good practice but it can be over done. Excessive failure prevention is costly and wasteful. On top of that, preventive tasks can overload your teams work order queue. As mentioned earlier, this is something you want to avoid. It also leaves your team with little bandwidth to tackle reactive issues. There should be a balance so your team can respond quickly to day-to-day corrective issues as well as take care of necessary preventive maintenance. There is no perfect ratio but with a little bit of systematic trial and error, you'll gradually improve.

This is the most basic and fundamental aspect of customer service. Letting people know what's going on alleviates a lot of anxiety both for you and your team as well as the folks who are requesting your assistance. Most work order management applications handle the communication aspects of maintenance operations well. As work orders move from one stage of the workflow to the next, information is shared with all stakeholders either through email, text, or in app updates. If you aren't using a system that is capable of mass communications, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page especially when there are a lot of work orders in progress. 

Cost tracking is important to any facility owner and it's up to your team to report operational costs, including the cost of maintenance activities. Completed work should be assigned labor rates as well as costs for inventory used or specialty purchases that were needed. The costs of operating tools, vehicles, and other equipment might also be taken into consideration such as fuel consumed and depreciation. Work order management software gives you the tools to track these easily and the information can be used to generate cost reports on a regular basis.

Q Ware CMMS provides facility maintenance professionals with easy to use software tools for work order management. Sign up below for a free guided tour and try Q Ware free for 30 days.