How follow-up work orders work.

There are several situations we designed follow-up work orders for:

• You have an inspection work order. Someone goes out with the inspection WO, fails any tasks that need work done. You then create a follow-up work order (or one per task) and attach a procedure (or procedures) for how to do the fixes, depending on the notes on what the reason for failures were. It may be that the person is junior and doesn't understand the reason for failure or the person may be able to accurately define what fix is needed.
• You have a routine maintenance work order. In the process of doing the routine maintenance, a more serious problem is noted that is:
  • beyond the capabilities of the person doing the work
  • The person doing the work doesn't have the tools, parts, time, expertise or qualifications to fix it 'now'
  • You have a corporate policy that a new work order needs to be created in this situation, even if the technician can (and does) fix it on the spot.

In all these cases, sometimes it will make sense to create one work order with all the failures listed, or it may be that the problems are serious enough (or it your corporate policy) to create one work order per failure.

In all these cases, the original task and work order are referential and not prescriptive of the problem noted or encountered. Meaning that we do not consider the original task to express what the follow-up task(s) should be.

Then we have another case, the one that other systems follow-up work orders are designed for:

• The problem is fully described in the task of the source (original) work order, but the scope of work is beyond the level intended. This could be because the person executing the work order does not know how to accomplish the task (perhaps they can't find the meter) or because they don't have the tools, time or expertise to follow the instructions.

In this case, the original task may have validity as is for the follow-up work order. We consider this to be a very rare case, but we provide the tools for you to do this.

We try to support both designs for most users. See more details below.

One of the biggest fundamental design features of MCe Follow-up work orders is that you will want to reference the original work order and tasks that caused the follow-up work order to be needed. We further assume that in many cases, someone will want to set the correct procedure for the follow-up work order with the single exception of the special situation above, where the original work order contains the instructions for the problem noted.

We also have several preferences that you can set at the level(s) that make the most sense for you to have the follow-up work orders work the way you want them to.

If you don't like the MCe way, just turn off those features in MCe using our preferences and UI Config.

If you want both, keep them both on, and, in MCe specify who, globally or by repair center, access group or person, should get the MCe way and who should not. Then for any users left that have both, just be careful.

Other systems copy to task only some data columns, we copy them all.

• we give you access to everything including the task photos.

Accruent Priority and Days of work for the follow-up work order.

This is one of 3 similar features that show that the Accruent design is very custom for one customer, and since that customer doesn't use MCe, we have decided to not model our follow-up work orders after the Accruent MRO design.

In simplified terms, Accruent's MRO looks at the procedure id that matches the category id of the work order, from there it looks up the priority, takes that value and turns it into how many days it will take to do the work order.

If none, it does the same with the default workorder priority

This was a custom feature made for a customer way back 'in the day' that is now the way it works for everybody so that they don't break that customer. We were notified at the time of this being the reason and we chose not to follow Accruent's lead (technically it was years before Accruent bought it) in this.

So to be clear, MCe doesn't do this. We provide you with the Priority you specify (or our default) for follow up work orders though preferences.

Accruent Account, Shop and Zone

Accruent takes it from the Asset if there is one instead of the source work order.

We take it from the source work order. Our assumption is that when you created the original work order, you thought about what the Account, Shop and Zone would be. To be fair, these may change because the original account might have been 'inspections' and now you are doing 'repairs'. But we allow you to pick and set it, rather than going to the Asset which itself might have values set for regular maintenance and not your current 'fix' needs.

Accruent requester set to one of the assigned labors

Accruent sets the requester to a random one of the assigned labor of the source work order. If there is only one, this might make a bit of sense, but if you have more than one assign labor, it is random which will be chosen. If you then call the person who is listed as creating the follow-up work order, there is a very good chance they will say "I have no idea what you are talking about, I didn't create any follow-up work orders.". If your use case is "only one assignee and the assignee is the only one allowed to create follow-up work orders" then the Accruent way will likely work nicely for you – but so will ours.

We instead set the requester to the person who pushed the button to cause the follow up to occur. We think that makes more sense than some random assignees to the original work order.

Multi vrs Single

With Multi, there is no procedure attached, one work order is created per failed task.

With Single, the procedure is copied but then the tasks are deleted.

In the case of the single, this will adjust your schedules, prevent schedules from running (with that procedure), it also means that it affects resources (everything the same as for the original procedure even though you are fixing parts that failed.) The Accruent single way means that the procedure that found the problem (possibly an inspection) becomes the procedure to FIX the problem. It is likely that Accruent added this as a special case for a customer way back 'in the day' and has carried it forward so they don't break that customer.

In our case, we follow the pattern of Multi. We put the follow-up service requests (work orders), the manager who is going to issue it/them should then pick a logical procedure that matches what it is that failed and needs to be fixed.

Older versions

An older version of Accruent's MRO did all of this as an automatic step, with no UI. Accruent's current one, like MCe's does it with UI, it is not automatic. Since most users don't run with that version of Accruent's MRO, we no longer document the differences between that product and MCe.