Work Order Management Best Practices

The work order management process can be inefficient or ineffective in many ways. Processing, prioritizing, and tracking incoming work orders require a lot of effort from maintenance staff. When you receive requests for maintenance from multiple sources, (emails, phone calls, instant messages, and in-person contacts) it can be difficult to organize them all.

Establishing work order management best practices ensures maintenance work is done effectively and efficiently. In this article, present some best practices for optimizing your maintenance workflow.

Work Order Management Best Practices

Surprisingly, many organizations do not have a formal work order process or system in place to manage work orders. Work order management best practices are centered on organized communication and consistency in how maintenance jobs are carried out. Each best practices discussed here relates to a different step in the work order process, covering everything from receiving maintenance requests to completing and closing work orders.

Provide a Formal Maintenance Request Channel

Many work orders start as maintenance requests, typically reported by page, phone call, email, or word of mouth. Tracking requests across multiple channels quickly becomes disorganized, making traceability and follow-up difficult. Instead, maintenance teams should provide a maintenance request system that allows non-maintenance employees, technicians, and other requesters to submit requests through a simple, online request form.

When used as part of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), maintenance managers can access and review requests from within a single system. In addition, the request form can be customized to your needs, including required fields, ensuring requesters are submitting all information necessary for you to prioritize and assign work.

By managing incoming requests through a single, standardized channel, maintenance teams gain greater visibility, faster response times, and fewer missed or duplicate requests, improving both communication and overall maintenance efficiency.

Designate Approvers

Many organizations choose to review incoming requests before they become work orders. To streamline this process, designate a request administrator who has the authority to approve (or reject) requests, ensuring that only valid maintenance work is added to the work order list. Request administrators should ensure that all requests contain complete information, and if not, follow up with requesters until all required information is available. This process helps to avoid bogging down the system with incomplete or duplicate requests that confuse maintenance technicians.

Similarly, there should be designated staff members that have the authority to approve work orders. Work order approvers are typically someone in a maintenance supervisor or maintenance manager role who can verify that work was completed correctly and completely. They may also help decide whether an asset should be subject to future repairs or replaced.

Ensure Work Order Completeness

Once work is authorized, maintenance managers or planners need to fully develop and determine the importance of the work order. This includes reviewing past failures, gathering helpful documentation, coordinating the required resources, and identifying the tasks and processes needed to complete the work order.

Review all of the fields and be sure they are filled out completely and accurately. Consider what documentation or materials need to be attached to work order to alleviate delays in completing the work order. Finally, consider the current maintenance workload and severity of the maintenance need detailed in the work order when prioritizing it.

Create Prioritization Guidelines

The next step in the work order management process is to prioritize the work for different types of work. For example, factors to consider are what is the urgency of the job, and will the job be assigned to the next available technician or will it be reserved for someone with a particular set of skills? To make prioritization easier, establish and follow set of guidelines for assigning priorities. Organizations may develop a set list of priorities, such as the following:

• Emergency: Stop everything else to do now: fire alarm goes off, gas leak, plumbing overflow, total power loss, etc.
• High: Finish what you’re working on, then do: broken lock, HVAC outage, broken elevator, or critical preventive maintenance tasks, such as replacing power rods in a nuclear plant
• Safety: Higher than medium priority: slip and fall hazards, sharp edges
• Medium: More important than low priority tasks, but not safety issues: broken exterior door, partial power loss, minor leaks, flat tire on infrequently used equipment
• Low: Operations can go on as usual without this task being done: painting a wall, installing a new shelf in the stockroom, or lubricating a door hinge that squeaks

Schedule Work Orders with Purpose

Once planned and prioritized, work orders can be added to the schedule. Schedulers should consider the priority, frequency, type of work, and resource availability when scheduling work orders. Organizations using manual methods should decide a uniform way to communicate the work order schedule, such as printed calendars, shared digital calendars, email calendars, or other scheduling tools. CMMS software typically includes a maintenance calendar and can send automatic notifications when work is added to the calendar or approaching its due date.

Document Everything

Accurate documentation is critical to effective work order management. As work is performed, technicians should record all relevant details directly in the work order, including:

• Steps taken to complete the task
• Observed issues or abnormalities
• Parts, materials, and tools used
• Labor hours and tasks performed
• Any safety or compliance notes

Documenting work as it happens ensures that important details are not forgotten and creates a reliable record for future troubleshooting, preventive maintenance planning, and audits. Even for smaller jobs, thorough documentation contributes to a comprehensive maintenance history that improves decision-making over time.

Complete and Close the Work Order Properly

Closing a work order is more than marking it “done.” Proper closure ensures that the maintenance record is complete and accessible for reporting, analysis, and compliance purposes. Steps for closing a work order include:

• Reviewing documentation for completeness
• Ensuring all required fields are filled in
• Updating the work order status
• Attaching any supporting documentation, such as files or photos

In a CMMS, closed work orders are automatically saved in the system’s history, allowing managers to analyze trends, track asset performance, and generate reports. Proper closure provides an accurate and auditable record of maintenance activity, reducing miscommunication and enabling smarter, data-driven decisions.

CMMS Work Order Functionality

The core purpose of CMMS software is to help organizations manage work orders. CMMS software offers comprehensive features that support work order management best practices. This functionality includes the ability to:

• Implement a maintenance request system to work in tandem with the core CMMS.
• Categorize work orders by type of maintenance.
• Define and assign work order priorities.
• Keep stakeholders in the know via notifications.
• Provide supplementary documentation using attachments.
• Analyze maintenance trends with detailed work order histories.
• Plan and adjust maintenance schedules to maximize asset uptime and minimize maintenance cost.
• Monitor the status of work orders from initial request to closure.
• Schedule maintenance work when the proper resources, parts, and tools are available.
• Fully document maintenance work.

Implement Work Order Best Practices with FTMaintenance Select

FTMaintenance Select is CMMS software designed to reduce or eliminate the complexity of managing work orders using powerful, yet easy-to-use-features like those mentioned above. With FTMaintenance Select , work orders are available on mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops. The ability to attach documents to each work order is helpful for providing complete and accurate work order information. Work orders can be created and submitted in a fraction of the time that it takes to manually type or write out and print a work order. Request a demo of FTMaintenance Select to learn how it improves your work order management process.