The NRX Blog

Historical work orders contain some of the most useful information necessary for planning and scheduling tasks. Analyzing historical work orders can not only help you organize future orders, but at the same time, it can help ease scheduling by identifying data gaps and missing information.

When it comes to maintenance activities, quality underpins everything. Most organizations strive to keep costs low while maintaining high-quality orders. However, costs associated with maintenance activities such as reactive maintenance, arranging spare parts, and last-minute repairs can increase costs and damage your assets.

You manage your work order perfectly until it is time to hand it over to maintenance workers to add relevant pieces of information about the work. You later realize that key information is missing or that your work order was not closed out efficiently. Does this sound familiar?

Two critical functions in your maintenance program include planning and scheduling. Planning is like the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of maintenance activities, while scheduling is the ‘who’ and the ‘when.’ Planning usually takes place before scheduling and involves aspects such as obtaining the right spare parts, skills, etc.

A company’s maintenance strategy can tell a lot about allocating their budgets, spending maximum time, and the overall failure rate of specific equipment. But what good is this data if not analyzed and corrected in the right way?

Spare parts management is a crucial aspect of efficient asset management. However, some organizations are usually apprehensive of stocking spare parts due to their fears of overutilizing capital expenditure.

Every work order has a life cycle. Understanding each phase and assigning appropriate tasks within the process ensures that there are no backlogs and delays. There are a few key elements that should ideally be included in maintenance work orders to yield maximum results.

Within most organizations, work orders are prioritized in the system by team members as they see fit. However, this method is not realistic in the long run as members are bound to rank their work orders as the top priority, leading to inaccuracies in ranking and prioritizing maintenance work orders.

Often, we shut down our computers once we are done using it for the day or when it is not in use. We do this so that we do not drain out the battery or skew its performance. Similarly, with all the different kinds of equipment that organizations use, shutdowns are crucial in ensuring the longevity of assets.

Within most CMMS systems, failure codes can be used on a work order to help identify why a particular type of equipment or asset failed. These codes are typically alphanumeric characters that are attributed to abbreviations of their descriptions.