As a technician, you spend a lot of time working on work orders. Day in and day out, your life is consumed by checking into work orders, updating work orders, completing work orders, and creating work orders. Sometimes, work orders become bloated and over-full of useless or irrelevant information, making it difficult to find the directions you need to complete your job. With all of your work orders, it’s important to make sure you’re following a few best-practices to make sure your work orders are clean, simple, and precise, containing only what you need and nothing you don’t.
Categorize Work Orders
Make sure your work orders are properly catalogued and labeled so that searching for and organizing completed and current work orders is quick and efficient for both you and your CMMS system. The less ambiguous you keep your system, the quicker things will be for everyone.
Properly Assign Work Orders The First Time
If you spend your time assigning work orders to others, ensuring that work orders are properly assigned the first time around will keep confusion to a minimum amongst your technicians. This simple tip will save your employees from completing work orders they aren’t supposed to- and making sure everything you need completed gets done.
Designate Priority Appropriately
While it’s easy to assume everything is just as crucial to your operations as everything else, some issues are more important than others, and should be taken care of first. Properly assigning priority when creating work orders can point your technicians in the right direction first, getting your business back on track…no matter how badly you want the coffee maker to be fixed.
Keep Perfect Track of Your Inventory and Cataloguing
It can be easy to overlook the chore of updating inventory usage, but is a crucial piece of the work order puzzle that will keep surprise part shortages from ever becoming a problem. Spending just another minute dutifully updating inventory can save several days of downtime down the line.
Document Only What You Need To Know- Both Good and Bad
Keeping detailed documentation of specific problems and work completed is important to efficiently reporting on maintenance operations down the line, but can quickly become overfilled with unimportant or irrelevant information. By ensuring that only the important stuff- both good and bad- is recorded, you’ll never have to worry about sifting through a paragraph of information to find the one relevant detail you need.
Avoid Oversimplification
While it’s easy to start paring back what you put into work orders, make sure you don’t go overboard. Omitting important details or leaving out data fields can lead to confusion and lack of relevant and useful reporting, and will become more of a burden than a boon for your maintenance operations and technicians.
Your work orders will instantly become a powerful informational tool that gives only what your employees need and nothing they don’t. Luckily, MicroMain’s CMMS has over 25 years of refinement and feedback that has molded our software into exactly what our customers need- and nothing they don’t. Following this guide, and feedback and training from our seasoned CMMS professionals, we can help your maintenance operations become more informed and efficient than ever. To find out more about our CMMS software and what it can do, schedule a free demo with us today!