Work order management is the recording, tracking, and handling of the completion of customer issues. After customer service receives customer questions, it will forward many problems that cannot solve according to online communication to the service personnel of relevant departments. The service personnel will solve the problems and give feedback to the customer service personnel. This is the general process of a work order management system. The work order management system can help enterprises establish a set of efficient and systematic management methods to improve service efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Here are the articles to explain, What are the advantages and types of work order management?
Work order management includes the processes and policies needed to plan and monitor work activities across the company. A work order management program helps in increasing the productivity of employees and ensures the quality of the products and services provided by the company.
Types of Work order management
While any company can apply work order management principles. There are different ways to plan work depending on the complexity of the company’s operations.
- Manufacturing: Work orders in manufacturing define by production schedules and master production schedules. Depending on the number of products and their complexity, the production plan can divide into work orders. So that each employee is responsible for a specific operation.
- Maintenance: A work order for a maintenance job groups together the tasks required to perform activities such as repairs or calibrations. For example, a repair order includes identifying the problem and its cause, finding a solution, and serving the repair.
- Professional Services: While professional service providers typically use project management software to track work, work orders can use for one-off activities.
Advantages of Work Order Management
Work order management has multiple advantages for businesses, the most important being:
- Increased Productivity: Employees who know exactly what they have to do when it’s due. How to do it is the most productive because they waste less time figuring out what their job is about. Idle time and errors can also significantly reduce by managing work orders.
- Improve quality: Tickets assign tasks to employees based on their qualifications, experience, and availability. This avoids putting unqualified employees in charge of complex activities, such as manufacturing or maintenance operations. Therefore, every action carries out by the most qualified staff. Hence, this helps maintain the high-quality products and services the company offers.
- Better accountability: Monitoring work orders allows companies to determine what works, and what doesn’t. Who is responsible for issues like managing defective products and low-quality service? Using this information, managers can take corrective actions to limit potential damage from substandard operations.
Essential Features of Work Order Management
Work order management includes the following basic features:
- Templates: Since most jobs tend to be repetitive, companies need work order templates that can reuse and repurpose for various activities, rather than having to start from scratch every time a new order create.
- Workflow: While simple jobs are simple, complex processes require workflow to distribute tasks to multiple employees across different departments and teams.
- Planning: Planning requires when it comes to working orders as they need to match the availability of employees and the activities they perform in each department of the company.
- Monitoring: Tracking work orders in real-time enables managers to analyze employee productivity and determine whether each performs the assigned tasks.
- Communication: All information required to execute a work order needs to communicate to the responsible employee. Additionally, employees must be notified of any changes to work orders to ensure they perform the correct activity at the right time.
- Analytics: Analyzing tickets can provide insight into what’s working and help companies identify issues and trends.
Best Practices of Work Order Management
To ensure that work order management brings the best results, companies should consider the following best practices:
- Identify and manage bottlenecks: Historical work order data can use to identify recurring issues that the company should address. Blockages, such as inefficient employees or lack of resources, can slow operations and negatively impact productivity and quality. Corrective action often requires addressing these challenges, such as reassigning staff or reallocating resources.
- Adjusting orders and reassigning work: No matter how managers plan work, there will always be exceptions and unpredictable changes. Since these can have knock-on effects and affect other operations, they must identify as quickly as possible and addressed quickly. To do this, managers can modify orders and reallocate resources on the fly. For example, a sick employee can replace with an equally qualified colleague.
- Establish goals and key performance indicators (KPIs): To better analyze the effectiveness of work orders, companies need to develop clear and realistic goals. KPIs are measurable values that show how efficiently a company manages work orders. KPIs compare predefined targets with actual performance to identify variances. For example, a maintenance department might aim to make 50 repairs per day, but only complete 45, which means its performance is lower than expected.
