Introducing Work Order Templates: Simplify and Standardize Your Maintenance Strategy

Maintenance managers rely on CMMS to give them the visibility they need to build smarter and more effective maintenance strategies.

But the software is only as powerful as the data stored within it. Incomplete or inconsistent maintenance records make it difficult to understand where to spend resources and prioritize work. And in today’s economic climate, keeping machines online requires you to be more calculated and resourceful than ever.

In a study published last year, “CMMS data quality” was voted by maintenance managers to be one of their top five challenges.

Furthermore, the respondents voted “getting people to use CMMS properly” as their second biggest challenge of all.

These two challenges are strongly linked because getting clean data into your CMMS really comes down to your team’s ability to enter information correctly. And even with substantial training, the pace and chaos of maintenance make mistakes and inconsistencies inevitable.

To help you improve your data quality and the way your CMMS is being used, today we’re proud to announce Work Order Templates.

Pre-filled templates enable frontline workers to create standardized and error-free work orders in just a few clicks, with minimal training. And they allow you to take huge strides forward in maintenance maturity by automating how different types of work orders are managed and recorded.

The Benefits of Work Order Templates

Work Order Templates give you the power to pre-fill any work order field when a new work order is created. This enables your technicians to quickly create and close work orders without having to attach procedures or manually enter details like asset, parts, location, priority, or due date.

To give you even more control over your maintenance standards, you can make certain types of data capture mandatory by marking fields as required or read-only.

For technicians in the field, creating a work order becomes as easy as scanning a QR code on an asset and selecting a template associated with that asset. This greatly simplifies recurring reactive jobs or PMs that don’t happen on a schedule. And it means you’re able to capture the right data every time without relying on technicians to remember things like location codes or which procedure to attach.

Work Order Templates enable you to:

• Improve data quality by eliminating inconsistencies and mistakes
• Increase adoption by making it easier than ever to create and complete work orders
• Improve standards by automating how different types of work are categorized and managed

Ultimately, by enforcing your maintenance standards using templates, you can accelerate the maturity of your maintenance strategy. You’ll have better data driving your decisions, and your team can focus on getting the job done–instead of thinking about how to categorize, prioritize or set the right due date on a work order.

How to Use Work Order Templates Effectively

Work Order Templates help to streamline and standardize recurring maintenance work across all industries.

Some of the most common and effective use cases for templates include:

• Reactive work that reoccurs. Accepting and unloading a delivery of materials is an example of a task that happens over and over but isn’t always easy to plan for. Reusable templates can enable any member of your team to create a work order quickly, log the delivery details accurately, and focus on completing the task on time. Similarly, templates ensure that recurring repairs or breakdowns can be addressed faster and are always categorized properly to give you accurate insights into why they occur.
• Unscheduled preventive maintenance. PMs don’t always happen on a strict, repeatable schedule. Sometimes inspections are done as a truck rolls into a facility or a technician happens to be near a machine. Templates make it incredibly easy for these inspections to be performed and recorded without relying on the technician to select the right asset or attach the right procedure.
• Default safety requirements. Some assets require a specific safety procedure to be followed before any work is performed, such as a lockout-tagout (LOTO). Reusable templates associated with the machine ensure the correct procedure is always attached.

How to Get Started

Work Order Templates were built in collaboration with our customers over the past few months to ensure we’re solving real-world problems for maintenance managers.

If you're already using MaintainX, you can easily convert common work orders into Work Order Templates. The information recorded in the work order simply carries over into a new template, which your team can quickly access and reuse.

Book a demo with us to learn more about what Work Order Templates can do for your maintenance strategy.