Has your organization run into the scenario where just because somebody says there’s a problem with an asset, doesn’t mean that the team will be able to look at it or work on it? How can your team adapt and respond in a timely manner to assess the severity of the problem? The solution may lie with comprehensive work orders within an enterprise asset management software solution.
People in your organization or community care, and they want to be involved. But creating a work order requires a lot of information. On top of that, just because somebody reports a problem doesn’t necessarily mean it is one – or doesn’t necessarily mean it is your organization’s problem.
So, What’s the Problem?
Complaints, in whatever form they arrive, whether called Work Requests, Service Requests, or calls to dispatch, is an easy, lightweight way for anybody – even a member of the public – to say, “I found problem X with asset Y” and for the people who manage those assets to organize and triage the complaints, ultimately creating work orders to do the work, if that is the appropriate course of action.
Separating complaints from work orders allows for a clean, separate stream of incoming “to-dos” that are more repair-oriented (reactive) than preventive maintenance-oriented (proactive). A good enterprise asset management (EAM) system also allows for reporting on the different types of complaints, and the source from which they were reported, in order to learn more about the process in order to improve it.
Has your organization run into the scenario where just because somebody says there’s a problem with an asset, doesn’t mean that the team will be able to look at it or work on it? How can your team adapt and respond in a timely manner to assess the severity of the problem? The solution may lie with comprehensive work orders within an enterprise asset management software solution.
People in your organization or community care, and they want to be involved. But creating a work order requires a lot of information. On top of that, just because somebody reports a problem doesn’t necessarily mean it is one – or doesn’t necessarily mean it is your organization’s problem.
Why Work Orders?
Work orders enable people who do work on assets to organize the work in a single place. The work order is both a request and a bill. It serves as both a record and receipt. There is always some reason for doing work: either to fix some problem, or to perform some service that will hopefully prevent problems in the future.
A good EAM system will enable the people who create work orders to see all the current complaints, known problems, and due services for a given asset. By separating complaints from work orders, it is clean and easy to group together related work.
For example, it is common that citizens in the community may report the same problem more than once. If the result of those reports were to create separate work orders, that would be a lot of duplicate work and wasted time as the work orders would need to be organized and closed. By staging the complaints first, supervisors can easily eliminate duplicates before the work order is created. Then when it comes times to create and schedule the work, it is easy to pull together all the activities that make sense to be performed at the same time, by the same work force. Or, if multiple work forces are needed, it is also easy to divide up the complaints so that they can be addressed on different work orders by the appropriately skilled workers.
Work orders allow your organization to record maintenance and repair jobs, efficiently respond to issues and keep track of your parts, labor and budget. Within a comprehensive EAM system, your software will use this information and relate it to your timekeeping, asset lifecycles, maintenance history, capital planning budgets and more. In many cases, an organized work order history may be just the evidence you need to get your budget increased for the next year. Don’t miss out on this important system!
