Work order management software helps an organization track, prioritize, and complete work orders across their business. When used along with a comprehensive work order and asset management system, it can help a company streamline its operations and ensure all equipment, devices, and building infrastructure are working correctly. In fact, having an effective work order system in place is vital to ensuring an organization is operating smoothly and its employees can use the equipment they need right when they need it. So, what is a work order? At a high level, a work order is an action or task assigned to a person or team. It describes the maintenance work required for a piece of equipment, and it can either be recorded on paper or digitally. Work orders can be submitted internally by an employee or externally by a customer. The Benefits to Having Work Order Management Software Depending on the size of the organization and nature of the industry, a maintenance team could receive hundreds of work orders per week. That’s where work order management software comes in. According to one recent study published by BusinessWire, companies using this kind of software saw a roughly 20% reduction in equipment downtime and material costs. Work order software can help you easily keep track of your incoming tickets, prioritize them, and monitor their status—and then also proactively refine your preventive maintenance program based on equipment performance data. Let’s take a look at several key benefits of work order management software—including the importance of connecting it with other business applications like your asset management system or CMMS. 1. Automating Work Orders With work order management software, you can automatically assign work orders to the right person or team. For example, if there is an issue with an HVAC system, you can ensure those tickets get auto-routed to the technician who has the correct qualifications to fix it. Plus, when you use work order management software that connects to a mobile application, your technicians in the field can enter notes about the equipment or update work orders in real time while working on the equipment. This reduces double entry, and it ensures your data is up-to-date and accurate. The entire process is streamlined: technicians can complete the assigned work, submit invoices, and track performance directly from the mobile application. Plus, when your work order management system is connected to a comprehensive asset management solution, technicians can instantly access relevant service history, manuals, knowledge bases, spare parts inventory, and training videos. 2. Streamlining Work Order Submissions Not only does work order management software streamline processes for technicians, it can also do the same for other employees who need to submit work requests. For example, when you integrate your work order solution with other business applications (such as IT systems), employees can use the same portal to submit both facilities tickets and IT-related tickets. They can simply describe their problem, and the system routes the request to the right queue. This makes it much simpler to create work orders—no matter what the issue might be. 3. Optimizing Preventive and Corrective Maintenance By making all documentation, training materials, and maintenance checklists available in one place, maintenance teams can streamline their process when performing periodic inspections—such as for safety checks or cleaning rounds. Plus, if they uncover an issue, they can directly submit a corrective work order to fix it. In addition, when using a software solution to manage all information about the equipment, it becomes much easier to identify trends. When facilities teams can see which equipment is consistently failing and which needs additional maintenance, they can more accurately forecast costs, adjust maintenance plans, manage resources, and budget for new equipment. 4. Gathering Analytics Sharing work order data on one central platform with your other business analytics gives you access to advanced, accurate metrics. You can create reports and dashboards that measure work order response times, asset repair costs, corrective maintenance requests, and more. This makes it much easier to visualize the information and see how you’re performing against KPIs, so you can plan for the long term and report out to key stakeholders. The Value of a Connected Workplace Having an effective work order management strategy can help you prioritize and complete work orders efficiently. Without a comprehensive system in place, you face duplicate data entry, longer completion times, and reduced visibility into asset performance. Work order management software can help streamline operations and ensure all equipment and devices are working correctly, especially when that software is connected to other business processes. Share
