10 Questions to Ask About Your Work Order Software
Does everyone have the visibility they need into work order details?
Each work order passes through multiple people in your company before it is completed. Someone at the store level submits it, a central facilities person may approve it, a vendor or technician reviews, assigns, and completes it, and the notes and invoices need to be closed out.
Every single person involved in a maintenance activity should be able to use work order software as a central source of truth. Whether someone needs to know a complete history of a specific piece of equipment or a report view of a portfolio-wide metric, they should access the same repository and find what they need.
Instead of maintenance info stored in multiple systems or email threads, streamline work orders into one dashboard and sync submissions, assignments, and real-time status updates.
Are there clear and consistent workflows, even across multiple locations?
Your customers expect consistency in their shopping experience — but one of the hardest things about retail work order management is achieving consistency in facilities management across locations.
If you have high volumes of work order requests, you need to be able to define workflows and standardize maintenance activity tracking.
A robust CMMS allows you to define approval or dispatch workflows by location, and assign priority levels or cost benchmarks based on internal guidelines. And with centralized visibility for all maintenance activities, you can monitor vendor and subcontractor performance with unified service standards and documentation.
Can we track actionable equipment lifecycle data?
When you tie work orders to specific assets, you build insights about your facilities over time. These records compile data about maintenance activities, spend, performance, repair history, and warranty data. With strong maintenance records built on work orders, you have actionable data that allows you to address recurring problems and make more strategic decisions.
Equipment lifecycle data can also inform future procurement or development decisions, especially if your retail company has ambitious growth goals.
Can we coordinate preventive maintenance effectively?
Preventive maintenance (PM) activities are critical to keep your equipment running effectively, but PMs can frequently fall low on the to-do list when more urgent issues arise.
Your work order software should make facilitating PMs as easy as possible, with tools like automated scheduling and assignments, flexible rescheduling, and priority levels. Dedicated PM work orders allow you to track labor, spend, and the impact across your stores and equipment.
Can we use this software to be more proactive in our maintenance strategy?
Reactive maintenance responds to problems only when they can’t be ignored, leading your team to “fight fires” every day instead of being strategic. This creates chaotic communication, delayed work order responses, and unnecessarily high costs and downtime.
For the long-term health of your retail locations, you don’t need to just check off work order tasks (reactive maintenance) — you need to use data to make better decisions and improve your facilities over time (proactive maintenance).
Your work orders contain information about your problem today, but also your operations tomorrow. Thorough work order data creates a foundation for examining downtime patterns, problems associated with certain stores or equipment, vendor issues, and trends in asset performance.
Can we streamline vendor or in-house coordination?
Whatever mix of external service providers, internal technician teams, and regional or preferred vendors you use for your work orders, the core challenge is always communication between teams.
There are multiple steps to the dispatch workflow, and everything needs to work together: original WO submission, field teams providing updates, spare parts availability, and closing out with a root cause analysis (RCA) or documentation, plus invoice processing.
With this many moving pieces, you need a work order solution that allows everyone to coordinate from a central record. Your work order management system should empower the people who are actually responding to work orders in the field with tools like mobile-friendly updates, tags and notifications, and auto-assignments.
Does this software help us control costs?
Maintenance costs come from many different directions and vendors, but tracking “OpEx” is a core responsibility for facilities maintenance. Your location-level managers may have benchmarks to budget against. Your vendors may be submitting invoices that need to be reviewed and recorded, potentially against applicable contracts. And your central facilities team needs to track maintenance costs for overall budget reporting.
Your work order solution should remove manual back-office bookkeeping, centralizing maintenance spend records in one place with transparency. Additionally, ensure your work order information integrates with other pieces of your retail organization, from accounting and finance to procurement and resource planning.
Is the platform flexible enough that store teams will use it?
Accurate work order submission creates the foundation for all maintenance activities. Your maintenance solution needs to be robust enough to provide insights and tools to your central facilities team, while also being user-friendly for store employees.
Ensure your maintenance requests are simple to submit, allowing the employees to easily report issues to the central facilities team and then get back to their other responsibilities. Consider implementing additional steps like QR codes on individual pieces of equipment, or mobile-friendly photo and documentation submission.
A CMMS work order portal can also allow store-level teams to check the status of their tickets after they submit them, creating two-way communication through a central record.
Is it mobile-friendly for teams on the go?
Your teams are in the field, not necessarily behind a computer. Make sure that your technicians have access to everything they need from a work order even on mobile, such as the asset record, service checklist, or equipment manual. Make it easy for them to provide updates and change work order status, including photos.
When your team can update work orders on the go, this means that field work and the admin work can move at the same speed, helping you get real-time status updates and better overall accuracy.
Is the reporting useful without being too complex?
Your central facilities maintenance team needs real-time, accurate data. However, you also need to generate reporting without creating a burden for location-level teams or requiring too much time on manual data compilation.
A robust work order software will allow you to efficiently run reporting about maintenance spend, equipment metrics, and recurring issues. Ensure you can “slice and dice” data to view insights about individual locations, regions, or the entire company. Accurate data allows you to compare and identify where locations or certain equipment classes are struggling, and intervene when necessary.
