Without an organized work order process, maintenance departments can quickly get bogged down in missed repairs and prolonged asset downtime. They become a frustrated team that has to shoulder a rain of complaints while struggling with unclear priorities.
This is why efficient work order management is at the heart of successful maintenance operations. It leads to shorter downtimes, lower long-term costs, and keeps frustration at bay for everyone involved in the process.
Today, we’ll explore everything you need to know about maintenance work order management, from definition to best practices. We’ll outline the typical work order process and share actionable tips for streamlining each step of that process.
What is a work order in maintenance management?
In maintenance management, a work order (WO) is a request for specific maintenance tasks to be completed. It’s a documented, standardized way to ensure that maintenance activities are carried out efficiently, consistently, and within set timeframes.
Ideally, a work order will detail what needs to be done, who will perform the work (usually a person/team/shift), the due date, the tools required, and any special instructions or safety precautions.
While there isn’t an official categorization maintenance teams need to follow, work orders can be roughly split into the following types:
- Preventive Maintenance Work Orders: Regularly scheduled tasks aimed at preventing asset breakdowns and keeping equipment in optimal condition.
- Corrective Maintenance Work Orders: Issued in response to a specific problem or equipment failure. Corrective WOs aim to restore an asset to its operational state and may be time-sensitive depending on the nature of the issue.
- Inspection Work Orders: Involve checks and assessments of equipment or facilities to identify potential issues before they lead to larger problems.
- Emergency Work Orders: These are high-priority orders that address urgent problems posing an immediate risk to safety, asset integrity, or operational continuity.
The definition and goals of work order management
Maintenance work order management refers to the entire process of organizing, tracking, and executing work orders. This process encompasses everything from the initial work request to the review and closure of the completed work order.
The primary objectives of work order management are to:
- Optimize asset performance: By ensuring that assets are consistently maintained, WO management helps prolong asset life and keep equipment in optimal condition.
- Boost team efficiency: An organized workflow enables maintenance teams to prioritize tasks effectively, making it easier to allocate resources and prevent overlapping efforts.
- Minimize downtime: A streamlined work order process reduces the time it takes to address issues, minimizing operational interruptions.
- Ensure compliance and safety: Work orders often include safety protocols and regulatory checks, ensuring compliance and protecting both personnel and assets.
Efficient work order management relies on coordination between maintenance, operations, inventory, and procurement. To streamline their workflows, businesses are looking to digitize their WO process. Small and mid-sized teams often go for a CMMS, while enterprises lean more towards ERP solutions. Now, CMMS and ERP are great — they offer so many different features that maintenance scheduling can become an afterthought. Using them to schedule work orders often ends up being too cumbersome or complicated for the average user.
If you recognize yourself in this description, check out the Sockeye maintenance scheduler. It integrates with your existing CMMS or ERP solution and makes scheduling a breeze.
Explaining the typical maintenance work order management process
WO management is not a one-person operation. Here’s a quick look at who’s typically involved in the process:
- Work requester: The individual who identifies a maintenance need — often an equipment operator or facilities team member. They initiate the process by submitting a work request.
- Work approver: Typically a supervisor or maintenance manager. They review submitted requests to determine their feasibility and whether they align with current resources and schedules.
- Work scheduler: The person responsible for planning and scheduling approved work orders. They assign tasks, coordinate with technicians, and ensure timelines are realistic. Ideally, you would have two standalone roles handling this: a maintenance planner and a maintenance scheduler. For efficiency, smaller departments often combine it into one.
- Technician: The maintenance professional tasked with carrying out the work detailed in the work order. They ensure the asset is repaired or maintained according to specifications.
Each role plays an essential part in keeping the maintenance process organized, efficient, and aligned with operational goals.
Below, we’ll go through each step of the maintenance work order management process, sharing best practices along the way.
Step 1: Work request submission
The work order process begins with a work request, which is submitted by someone who notices a need for maintenance. This requester is often an equipment operator, facilities manager, and even technicians themselves who spot a problem while performing routine maintenance.
Best practices for streamlining work request submissions:
- Use standardized request forms: Create standardized digital or physical forms that require critical information like asset ID, location, issue description, estimated urgency level, and contact info of the person submitting the request. This will significantly reduce back-and-forth for missing information.
- Provide clear submission guidelines: Set clear guidelines for requesters on what details are necessary and why they matter — especially in the open-ended text field where they need to describe the problem.
- Utilize digital submission tools: Whenever possible, use CMMS or a similar tool to capture work requests. Digital tools help organize and track submissions, reduce paper clutter, and often allow requesters to also attach images or videos.
A well-documented work request ensures the maintenance team has all the information they need to assess, prioritize, and plan the work.
Step 2: Work request review and approval
Once a work request is submitted, the work approver — often a supervisor or maintenance manager — reviews it to decide if it should proceed as a work order. They check for potential overlaps with other work orders, assess urgency, and consider resource availability.
Most work orders will be approved. However, a request may be denied or delayed if it is deemed low-priority, redundant, or the resources (technicians, tools, spare parts) for completing the required work are not available.
A couple of tips to streamline your approval processes:
- Standardize the review process: Create a simple checklist work approvers can use to quickly evaluate (read approve or deny) incoming work request submissions.
- Automate approval workflows: Leverage automation within CMMS or EAM systems, where feasible, to streamline approvals based on predefined criteria. This helps reduce delays and manual work for routine requests.
- Communicate decisions clearly: If a request is denied or delayed, provide clear feedback to the requester. This builds understanding around maintenance priorities and reduces the likelihood of duplicate submissions.
By setting up a consistent review and approval process, maintenance teams ensure that they are allocating their limited resources effectively.
Step 3: Work order prioritization, planning, and scheduling
After a work request is approved, the next step is to prioritize, plan, and schedule the work order. The work scheduler typically handles this process — setting timelines, allocating resources, and ensuring that everything needed for the task is in place.
Here are some best practices maintenance teams can follow to optimize this step:
- Establish a priority matrix: Establish a clear system to prioritize work orders based on asset criticality, safety and operational impact, and downtime potential. This approach ensures that the most important tasks receive immediate attention.
- Check resource availability: Confirm that all necessary parts, tools, and personnel are available before scheduling the work order. This prevents delays and minimizes potential downtime due to missing resources.
- Take worker skill into account: When assigning tasks, consider each technician’s skill set, current availability, and overall workload.
- Proactively manage spare parts inventory: Use historical data to keep an organized stock of commonly required parts and materials. This minimizes wait times and interruptions due to supply shortages. As a bonus, you’ll also be quicker to respond to unplanned work.
In other words, proper prioritization and planning keep high-priority tasks moving forward and ensure maintenance operations remain efficient and responsive.
Step 4: Work order execution
During this step, the assigned technician or maintenance team carries out the tasks specified in the work order.
Best practices for ensuring maintenance work is done safely, timely, and efficiently:
- Create standardized procedures: Use standardized operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure that work is performed consistently and safely. This helps avoid errors, reduces risks, and speeds up work.
- Document work thoroughly: Encourage technicians to record details of the work performed, including any issues encountered, parts replaced, and time taken. Detailed maintenance history is invaluable for future troubleshooting and decision-making.
- Ensure safety protocols are followed: Prioritize safety by reiterating the importance of following safety procedures, using personal protective equipment (PPE), and adhering to lockout/tagout (LOTO) protocols.
- Communicate progress: Technicians should provide real-time updates or status reports as they work, especially for tasks that span multiple shifts or days. This keeps all relevant team members informed, enabling them to plan around any delays or resource adjustments as needed.
Of course, there are many other ways to improve productivity and work quality. We always recommend setting and tracking KPIs like equipment uptime and schedule compliance. It is a great way to spot systematic problems you need to address.
Step 5: Work order review and closure
After the maintenance task is completed, a senior technician or maintenance supervisor reviews the work done to ensure it meets quality standards. They also verify that all required documentation is in place. If everything looks good, the work order can officially be closed.
Here’s how to properly close the WO management process:
- Verify task completion and quality: Ensure that the work meets all quality and operational standards, especially if it involves critical equipment. This may include a post-maintenance test or inspection to verify that the asset is functioning as expected.
- Collect feedback from technicians: Ask technicians for input on any challenges they encountered or suggestions for improving the process. Such a feedback loop can be valuable in refining future work orders and improving the overall workflow.
- Update maintenance records: Ensure that asset maintenance records are updated with all relevant information from the completed work order. This data is crucial for tracking asset performance, understanding maintenance costs, and making informed decisions about asset lifecycle management.
- Notify the work requester: When needed, notify all affected parties that the work is completed (or at least the person who submitted the work request). If you digitize your work order process, the system can usually send an automatic notification upon marking the WO as done.
With this step, we conclude the typical maintenance work order management process. But before we let you go, here’s one more thing to consider.
Bonus step: WO process tracking and reporting
We get it, you’re busy and don’t want to waste time on administrative work. However, without basic tracking and reporting, you’re destined to do more work than you actually need.
Schedule some time to periodically review data and KPIs. This will enable you to continuously improve and streamline the maintenance work order process.
Here’s what to focus on:
- Track relevant KPIs: Regularly monitor KPIs such as schedule compliance hours, work order completion rates, and maintenance backlog. These indicators provide valuable insights into team efficiency, asset reliability, and potential areas of improvement. Here is the full list of KPIs Sockeye helps you track out of the box.
- Use analytics to identify recurring issues: Analyze data from completed work orders to spot patterns in equipment failures or recurring maintenance tasks. Addressing these underlying issues can lead to more effective maintenance strategies and reduce the frequency of breakdowns or repairs.
- Schedule regular reviews: Set up a routine (monthly, quarterly, etc.) to review work order performance and trends with the team. These reviews allow you to track progress over time, discuss challenges, and adjust strategies to meet evolving operational needs.
These steps are crucial for transforming maintenance management from a reactive process to a proactive, data-driven approach.
Simplify work order scheduling with Sockeye
Sockeye is a small but powerful work order scheduler that can integrate with your existing CMMS and ERP solutions to streamline and simplify scheduling for busy maintenance teams. Sockeye’s platform allows managers to schedule work based on real-time information about technician availability, reactive work, and current workloads. You can even let Sockeye’s automation build daily/weekly schedules for you — then review and edit them as needed before publishing.
All of this culminates in a live, verified schedule that keeps your whole facility on the same page.
Want to learn more? Book a demo and we will show you how Sockeye can improve scheduling at your facility.
