How to Streamline Work Order Management
Work order management is an integral part of facilities maintenance. Whether the HVAC is due for regular servicing or a pipe burst on an upper floor, work order management is the process organizations use to map out projects, allocate resources, assign tasks, ensure work complies with regulations, and most importantly, minimize the disruption to operations.
A vital part of work order management is defining the scope of work and correctly prioritizing it. Your maintenance department needs the ability to make repair-or-replace decisions based on the specific asset and your responsibilities according to the facility’s lease. But that’s not how it usually works.
Sometimes the information your team needs doesn’t exist. Or it’s scattered across so many different tools and datasets that it may as well be inaccessible. Or the one person who keeps the information in their head is unavailable.
Facilities maintenance software helps smooth things over by keeping everything related to a work order in one place. But many of these solutions are missing valuable functionality that simplifies work order management and helps your maintenance workers make better decisions about your assets.
If you want to streamline work order management, you need to make sure your process and tools allow you to:
- Automate work order routing
- Include work order history for the asset
- Calculate the asset’s net present value (NPV)
- Import landlord responsibilities and lease information
Automate work order routing
A single work order can involve a lengthy series of handoffs between various employees and vendors. It can take multiple specialists to complete a project, some of whom may be external contractors. As each step is completed, the project has to find its way to the next person. Obviously, it can get incredibly complicated to manually route dozens of work orders to the correct personnel. Assign a work order to the wrong person, and it slows down the entire project.
Facilities maintenance software like Tango Maintenance lets you establish criteria for selecting the right internal team or external vendor for work orders. Using your criteria, it automatically routes work orders to the people who will complete them, freeing your facilities managers to focus on other tasks.
Include work order history for the asset
Facilities personnel grow familiar with specific assets over time. They know which ones they service the most and what kinds of problems they’re prone to. But there could be many people who work on a single piece of equipment, and they won’t all know what everyone else has done.
Suppose your HVAC is heating and cooling unevenly, so you’re considering having it serviced. Before you call a technician, you’d want your facilities manager or administrator to know that you’ve also recently had to fix a compressor, replace the heat exchangers, and address refrigerant leaks.
Work order history is crucial for making informed repair or replace decisions, and it also helps your team decide if an asset should get a bare-minimum band-aid repair or a more thorough (and expensive) one. It helps them evaluate things like how much life the asset has left, how long the repair may last, and how much your business has already spent trying to keep the asset operational.
Tango Maintenance automatically includes past work order history for each asset. So when a new work order comes in, you’ll see what work has been done over the years, who did the work, and how much you’ve spent on a given asset.
Calculate the asset’s net present value
With leased assets, the net present value (NPV) of your total lease payments will sometimes exceed 90% of the asset’s fair market value. In this structure, you’re essentially leasing to own the asset, and it transfers both the benefits and risks from the lessor to your organization.
Why does that matter to anyone besides your lease accounting team? Because now your facilities team should consider the asset as something you’re eventually going to own. You want to maximize this asset’s lifespan and get the most mileage out of it. But you also want to be cautious that your total investment in the asset doesn’t exceed its total value.
Your facilities maintenance department won’t want to calculate the NPV of an asset every time a work order comes in. And at most organizations, they wouldn’t even have access to the information they need to do so. They’d have to talk to your lease accounting department before starting on a work order. But with Tango Maintenance, the work is already done. Tango can integrate with your lease accounting software and perform NPV calculations for your team, so they can quickly make informed decisions.
Import landlord responsibilities and lease information
Facilities maintenance teams often have to make costly decisions in a bubble. They don’t have access to crucial lease-related information—all they know is that something your organization depends on isn’t working, and the longer it’s inoperative, the more it disrupts your business. This inevitably leads to your business repairing or replacing assets you weren’t responsible for maintaining, or spending far more than you should have on an asset your lease is about to end on. Imagine buying a new roof that’ll last 20 years when you’re only going to be in the building one more year!
With Tango Maintenance, your facilities team doesn’t have to chase down your lease administration department every time a work order comes in. Tango imports the relevant lease information and surfaces it in the work order. Your facility manager can see who’s responsible for maintaining the asset and how much time is left on the lease. This way, you won’t waste time and money on assets your landlord has to take care of.
Work order management done right
At any given time, you could easily have a hundred or more open work orders spanning multiple locations, each requiring input from a variety of contractors and staff. It’s a lot to manage. But with facilities maintenance software like Tango Maintenance, you can complete projects efficiently and effectively.
Get each work order to the right person at the right time, and give them the context they need to make accurate decisions.
Want to see how it works?