For many facility managers, work order management is like the family junk drawer. It’s messy, disorganized, but functional enough to set aside. However, when it goes unchecked for enough years, by the time it starts to cause problems no one knows where to start. If you let this happen in your kitchen, it’s not a big deal. However, when you let your work order management process get out of hand, you’ll have a big mess to clean up sooner or later.
On average, maintenance departments handle 45 or more work orders per week. Without a seamless management system, this can easily become overwhelming for your staff. In addition, with no work order management system, you cannot look at your maintenance trends over time. Your management process serves as an analytical tool for wrench time studies and much more, but only if it is in order.
Work order management issues will inevitably affect your entire staff. That’s why it’s important to address them now so your maintenance team can work effectively and save your business money. Below are the steps to maximize performance through more effective work order management:
Steps To Clean Up Your Work Order Management
- Identify missing inventory, inaccurate records, and outdated service requests. The first step is to clear out the clutter within your work order management system. Oftentimes when work order management gets out of hand, the staff leaves old or outdated information because they’re overwhelmed. In order to create order from this chaos, you have to do an overhaul of your outdated system.
- Reorder your current work order list by priority, not time. Once you’ve eliminated or addressed outdated information within the system, you can reorder your work requests by urgency. Talk with your maintenance team to determine which repairs are necessary versus which can be put on the backburner for now. The goal is to eliminate all work orders from most to least urgent so your maintenance team can start fresh.
- Convert your work order management process to digital. If you are still using handwritten notes or emails for your work order management, it’s time for a change. MaintenX uses a fully automated work order management system to ensure that every request is addressed immediately. Our dispatch team receives the work order as soon as it is submitted, and we can send a team out within hours to address the problem. Communication issues are significantly reduced, leading to increased efficiency for both the business and maintenance team.
- Implement goals and standardize your work order processing. Managing work orders isn’t just about crossing tasks off a to-do list. You want to look at the big picture and understand how your work order management can impact facility efficiency and costs. By providing a direction for your maintenance team, you can see a greater reduction in costs and inefficiencies.
According to Fiix data, you can increase asset performance by 50% when you organize your work order management. MaintenX can help you achieve these results with our automated work order management. We work with the finest maintenance specialists who will be dispatched to your location within hours of submission.
