Managing Your Maintenance Strategy with High Quality Work Orders

Whether you’re in the oil and gas industry, automotive industry, transportation industry, or another industry that requires more than the average amount of assets and equipment to operate successfully, managing your maintenance is important! If you’re reading this as a person who works in the field of reliability, maintenance, or asset-management, we’re hoping we don’t have to outline the reasons why it’s important to have a strong maintenance strategy that prevents downtime and keeps your equipment in tip top shape. High quality work orders and work order data can be a key component of improving your maintenance strategy. Taking a step towards optimizing your maintenance and your work orders begins with knowing what strategy is working best for you in the first place and how well your work orders reflect the actual work being done

Seeing the strategy in your work orders

Most kinds of maintenance can be divided into two categories: proactive and reactive. Each of these categories can be even further broken down into subcategories (for instance, see the difference between two different types of proactive maintenance, preventive and predictive, in this blog post!). Most organizations will use a combination of both kinds of maintenance.

A majority of your organization’s maintenance is ideally proactive, as this is typically much more cost effective than reactive maintenance, which is harder to predict and may address bigger and more costly maintenance issues.

The description of a maintenance task in a high quality work order can indicate whether the maintenance a worker is doing is proactive or reactive, and in an ideal world, maintenance workers are carefully documenting the type of work they are carrying out in your EAM or CMMS system. In the long term, this can help your business determine if they’re meeting industry norms in terms of time and money spent on proactive or reactive maintenance. However, accurately analyzing how much is really spent on the types of maintenance most often carried out will be challenging if workers neglect documenting what work they do, or if they alter the time or money spent on certain tasks in order to look better on paper. As a result, your organization may be spending far more on proactive or reactive maintenance than you may realize, and some of these expenses may be totally unnecessary. However, without a reliable way to evaluate your work orders, you’ll never know the true cost of maintenance to your business.

​Does the quality of your work orders reflect the quality of your maintenance?

The saying “knowledge is power” may be a common cliché, but it’s absolutely true. Analyzing your work orders gives you the knowledge to address issues you may have been unaware of, and it empowers you to work towards improving your maintenance strategies. High quality maintenance goes hand in hand with high quality work orders, and to neglect the importance of one is to neglect the importance of the other. If you’re interested in re-examining how your organization approaches its work orders, try checking out one of our resources below, or book a demo with us to start learning more about your work orders and maintenance strategy!