Work Flow
0100 Overview of the flow

Work Orders are a vital component of any organization that has equipment that needs to be maintained, repaired or replaced. It allows for proper identification and monitoring of problems, ensures proper maintenance of equipment, plans larger projects and schedules corrective action as needed. In this article, we will discuss the work flow and process involved in creating and assigning work orders.

As a result, Work Orders are the core of Maintenance Connection Everywhere, MCe, allowing your organization to identify and monitor problems identified with equipment, ensure equipment is properly maintained, plan larger projects and schedule corrective action as needed.

The most common ways to get to work on a Work Order are:

  • From the home screen calendar, click on a WO that has been assigned to you
  • From the home screen, go to the main (left) menu and choose Work Order or Work Order Admin, this will take you to the WO page which will have a list. If you are on a wide screen, the list will be on the left and a chosen WO will show in the main body of the page, if you are on a narrow screen, the list will be on the left and move out of the way when you choose a WO

Technicians, and Administrators working in the technician WO module can mostly skip over all the parts until you get to a WO that has been issued and typically ends when it is completed. The admin WO module handles everything up to and including issuing the work order and everything after the work order is completed.

--sidebar Note: If you are using the API, the statuses Responded, Completed and Finalized are all part of the "Issued" status. This fact is hidden in the UI but may show up in reports if desired and of course when using the API. --^sidebar

To view statuses, the normal path and how they relate to assignments and approvals, see --http Work Orders 110 Overview of the flow of a WO, Status

#Creating Work Orders

There are 4 (four) major ways that Work Orders are created:

  • Reactionary, also known as Corrective Work orders
    • WO module "create Service Request"
    • Service Requester
    • Events and Actions
    • Asset Module
    • Procedure Module
  • Planned Projects
    • Project module
    • Project template module (also creates a Project to hold the work orders)
  • Preventative Maintenance (PM)
    • Events and Actions
    • Automations, scheduled, metered
  • Predictive Maintenance (PdM)
    • API and DataHub, responding to Predictive Maintenance software or a group (internal or external to your organization) process that analyses your assets and schedules maintenance directly or through the PM (Preventative maintenance) scheduler.
    • Automations, specification values
    • Events and Actions

Each of the ways above will bring a different starting point to the Work Order. A Service Request for example will have far less data and leave the purpose open ended for a technician or administrator to resolve, a procedure on the other hand may give an extremely detailed starting point.

#Assignment of a Work Order

MCe provides powerful tools to allow for proper assignment of the correct people to work orders. Factors include the minimum skills needed, the load of the workers, scheduling conflicts, holidays and more.

There are also tools, such as when a technician creates a work order on the job site, for it to be self assigned to the worker that created it.

A person tasks with assigning the work orders can use visual and sorting tools, some that come with the base product and more advanced tools that are available for those with more complex needs.

Once assigned, the technician will automatically receive the assigned work order as part of their regular sync process, usually before they are ready to do move one to the new work.

For more information, see --link <GUID> Work Orders, Assignments

#The Parts of a Work Order

Once created, work orders consist of several parts.

Summary

All the base information such as the reason, who requested it, what asset, some quick status setting buttons, where it is located, the target date and time, priority, overall instructions, special instructions that come from the Asset and assignments.

Status

Labor reports, what status it currently is in, other detailed status information and status history, downtime for the asset, and keeping track of what the problem was, reason and solution.

Tasks

  • Hierarchical (optionally) tasks in a tree to keep track of the steps that need doing on a work order.
  • For very simple work orders you might have no tasks, or if you want to require that the person performing the work order check 'complete' vs 'failure' or 'N/A' you might want to have a minimum of one task.
  • N/A has situational meaning, it might mean Not Applicable on Not Available - but the essence for a task is the same.
  • If you have more than about 10 tasks in a procedure you should consider using the hierarchical option so you can break the tasks down into sections such as:
    • Safety setup
    • Preparation
    • Repair
    • Cleanup
    • Admin cleanup

In addition, you can have tasks broken down into sub tasks, as deep as you need. We have customers who have procedures that have 1000's of tasks (over 5000 have been mentioned to us)

If you have junior and senior technicians, you might want to have certain tasks that they can open to see the details if they are junior, and just ignored if they are senior.

There is tooling for technicians to quickly find their place, what we call our 'smart open' that takes you to the first task that hasn't been finalized (competed, failed or set to n/a).

Tasks can be meter readings or specification that must be checked.

Costs on the base work order

  • Labor Labor records can be either estimates or actuals. You can use estimates to create actuals when performing the work order. Typically the estimates can be crafts and the actuals be an actual person, but sometimes, when used primarily for billing, the actuals can be a craft as well - this is especially useful when you maybe want to charge a senior electrician as a junior because you had now junior available to perform the work and your contract requires you not bill for a senior when a junior could have done the work. Estimates can contain target hours to do work. Actuals contain the actual (or billable) hours for the work. Labor records on a work order are one to many per laborer that works on it. There are timers to help automatically calculate the time spent and create labor actual cost records.
  • Parts Parts records can be either estimates or actuals. You can use estimates to create actuals when performing the work order.
  • Other This may be a charge such as an emergency off hours cost. Or a 'part' that you pick up and don't want tracked through the parts/inventory, or a rental of some equipment that you don't want to put through tools.
  • Tools Some people treat the tools as a true 'cost', such as if you charge or have to rent the tool. Others use it simply as a way of keeping track of what tools you need to collect and take with you.

Attachments on the base work order

  • Photos can be added showing a 'before' and 'after' for example.
  • Documents such as product manuals are almost as common.
  • Signature(s) can be collected. These might be a signature from your client showing that the work has been done, and/or a signature authorizing access to start the work.

index: Overview, Work flow, Process