{"id":178267,"date":"2023-10-18T11:00:54","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T15:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fiix.wpengine.com\/?p=178267"},"modified":"2024-02-01T18:04:12","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T22:04:12","slug":"why-work-orders-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fiixsoftware.com\/blog\/why-work-orders-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Why work orders deserve more love from all of us"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve been looking at work orders all wrong<\/h2>\n

The average maintenance department handles 45 work orders every week. That\u2019s over 2,200 work orders every year. Or a new request every four hours. In other words, the maintenance team impacts your business almost constantly. And that impact is huge. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one problem: Work orders rarely get the attention needed to make this potential a reality. Take common work order metrics, like planned maintenance percentage<\/a>, for example. They can be useful for maintenance teams, but they don\u2019t tell you much about the impact work orders have on business. And businesses are suffering because of it.<\/p>\n

Companies can\u2019t tell if they\u2019re hiring the right people, making the right decisions about capital expenditures, or promising their customers the right things without knowing if work is being done the right way. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why it\u2019s time to stop looking at work orders as just a task on a to-do list. When you put thousands of them together, they tell a much bigger story about human behavior, asset performance, processes, and more. It\u2019s time we read that story. <\/p>\n

Why bad work orders are bad for business<\/h2>\n

Broken work order processes are one of the quickest ways for minor maintenance problems to get out of hand. For example, at Liberty Oilfield Services, poor work orders led to massive amounts of missing inventory<\/a> and unnecessary costs.<\/p>\n

The team at Liberty was getting \u201cjust a fraction of what really happened. There was no failure analysis, no context, no insurance for our mechanics,\u201d in the words of Jack Featheringill, Liberty\u2019s US Maintenance Manager. <\/p>\n

For Rambler Metals and Mining, bad work orders processes were wasting everyone\u2019s time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever was finishing up their 12-hour shift would have to write pages of notes,\u201d says Scott Britton, GM of Operations at Rambler. \u201cWriting those notes could take up to an hour, and the next person would have to spend the first part of their shift going over the notes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issues that poor work order processes cause often spill off the shop floor and into other parts of the business. You just have to look at the problems Liberty and Rambler had to see the potential ripple effects. <\/p>\n

How inaccurate records and missing inventory affect a business<\/h3>\n

When finance, purchasing, and maintenance aren\u2019t working with the same information (or any information), it could cause: <\/p>\n