It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Manual Work Orders

​With school budgets under a microscope and districts needing to comply with strict cleaning and sanitation guidelines due to the pandemic, examining your school’s work order system is a timely and responsible activity. If your district is not currently utilizing software to manage your work orders there are some good reasons why now is the time to look. For less money than you think, it’s a necessary upgrade in today’s reality.

A manual system (including the use of spreadsheets) to track work orders and preventative maintenance tasks can get bogged down and hard to manage in a hurry. Between constantly communicating back to staff on the status of work orders and keeping track of who is doing what, a manual system can make more work for facility staff than needed. If you are operating with a manual system, imagine having an online work order system where staff can log in and submit new tickets and check on the status of existing tickets without having to track someone down. Imagine not having real-time updates in a system that eliminate the version control problems on your spreadsheets. Or, having notifications alert you when it’s time to perform a recurring preventive maintenance check on your assets and seeing the history work done on the asset.
Here are some common problems we see with districts still using manual methods.

WASTED TIME

• Completing and handing in paper forms is inconvenient and time consuming.
• Losing or misplacing papers during the process resulting in work orders that don’t get completed or take a long time to complete.
• Skipping certain approvers during the process, only to have extra work later when a work order is not completed properly.
• Prioritizing the order of work orders. Time is spent trying to keep things manually organized and is very susceptible to human error.

WASTED EXPENSES

• Additional staff labor is needed to track and manage work orders.
• Lack of automated preventative maintenance schedules potentially puts assets at risk and reduces asset life.
• Lack of an automated inventory system could result in inefficient purchasing of supplies.

INEFFICIENT OPERATIONS

• Maintenance and IT staff who complete work orders don’t always have a clear idea of the true nature of the problem resulting in wasted time and inefficiencies.
• Important preventative maintenance tasks are not regularly performed due to lack of a centralized schedule.
• Lack of insight without reporting to see what your staff is spending most of their time on and if there are redundancies in work effort that could be eliminated.
• No historical view of work done on assets or rooms.

MISCOMMUNICATION

• Requesters do not have insight into the status of their work orders.
• The space requiring the work order is not always available when needed.
• Paper forms can be chaotic to manage with multiple copies that need to get routed to different departments.

With work order software, schools eliminate a lot of wasted time and energy from their old, manual ways. With a centralized district system, facility professionals realize the benefits right away.

• Eliminate searching through files or binders for specific work orders, instead search and find immediately through a system.
• Track maintenance and IT work orders in one place
• Standardize the process district-wide instead of having each building run its own system.
• Manage state reporting requirements for COVID-19 related procedures.

​To learn more about how a work system can help your district and the key features to look for in a system, we invite you to download our Guide to Comparing Work Order Systems.

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