Maintaining business premises
Work order
A work order is the written instruction that assigns a maintenance job to a specific person or company: what needs doing, on which piece of equipment or where, with what priority and by when. When it is closed, the hours, the materials used and what was done are recorded.
Also known asWO · job sheet · service order · job card
A report versus an instruction: maintenance ticket and work order
They are two documents that get mixed up because they sometimes travel together. The maintenance ticket is written by whoever sees the problem: the waitress who notices the cold room is not cooling, the gym member who finds a shower with no hot water. It is a report, and it says what is happening. The work order is issued by whoever organises maintenance and is addressed to whoever does the repair: it says what to do, where, how urgently and who is in charge of it.
A ticket may produce no order at all (it was a light bulb and the supervisor changed it on the spot) or several (the plumber takes things apart, the electrician checks the pump). And some orders do not come from any ticket: those for preventive maintenance, which come from the calendar. A complete order usually includes:
- Number and date of issue
- Equipment or location (cold room 2, treadmill 4, the ground-floor toilets)
- Type: corrective, preventive or improvement
- Priority and deadline
- Who is responsible: in-house technician or outside contractor
- On closing: work done, hours, materials and signature
A hotel example: room 214 reports that the air conditioning is noisy. Reception opens the ticket. The head of maintenance issues the order to the technician on shift, with high priority because the room is occupied. The technician replaces a fan, notes down half an hour and the part, and closes it. With those hours recorded, MTTR can be worked out.
Worth knowing
A full work order, with materials and costs, is the heart of a CMMS. A small business does not always need one: often it is enough for every report to have an owner and a closing time. Before deciding, it is worth seeing how a CMMS and a spreadsheet differ.
Sources
Related terms
- Maintenance ticketA maintenance ticket is the record of a fault in a residence's facilities (a dripping shower, a broken blind) with what is wrong, where, who reported it and when. It is used to assign the job to whoever fixes it, track the deadline and keep a record of how it was closed.
- CMMSA CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) is the software a maintenance team uses to keep the asset register, work orders, the preventive plan, spare parts and costs. In Spanish it is known as GMAO.
- Corrective maintenanceCorrective maintenance is the work done once something has already failed: repairing the cold room that will not cool, replacing the blown fluorescent tube, unblocking the changing-room drain. It differs from preventive maintenance, done on a set date, and from predictive maintenance, done when a reading gives warning.
- MTTRMTTR (mean time to repair) is how long it takes, on average, to get a failed piece of equipment working again. It is worked out by adding up the time spent on all the repairs in a period and dividing that total by the number of repairs in the same period.