Work order
A work order is an instruction to carry out a specific piece of maintenance or repair on a specific item, tracked from raised to completed.
A work order is an instruction to carry out a specific piece of maintenance or repair on a specific item, tracked from raised to completed.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: maintenance work order, job card.
A work order exists to make maintenance work trackable rather than verbal. Its value is entirely in having states: raised, approved, assigned, in progress, complete. Anything that skips straight from "someone mentioned it" to "someone maybe fixed it" is not a work order, whatever it is called.
The states matter because they answer the questions supervisors actually ask: what is outstanding, what is waiting on parts, who is it assigned to, and how long has it been sitting there.
Planned work orders come from a maintenance schedule and appear on their own when due. Reactive ones start with a fault someone reported.
The ratio between the two is one of the more honest measures of a maintenance operation. Heavily reactive means firefighting, and it usually shows up alongside high unplanned downtime and rising repair spend.
Closure should produce a record, not just clear a queue: what was actually done as opposed to what was requested, parts used, time taken, cost, and whether the underlying fault is resolved or merely worked around.
That last distinction is what stops the same fault being fixed four times, and it is only visible if fault reports and completed work are linked to the same item.
Maintenance requested verbally has no state, so nobody can say what is outstanding, work gets duplicated or forgotten, and the same recurring fault is repaired repeatedly without anyone noticing the pattern.
Itefy handles this with issue tickets and scheduled maintenance rather than a separate work-order module: a reported fault becomes a tracked issue, can be scheduled as a repair, and closes into the item's service history with cost. Read more.
A service request is the ask — usually from whoever noticed the problem. A work order is the authorised instruction to do the work. Not every request should become a work order, which is why an approval state exists.
Not under that name. The same lifecycle is handled by issue tickets that can be scheduled as repairs and close into the item's service history — which covers the equipment case without the weight of a full CMMS work-order module.
A maintenance schedule is the plan of what servicing each item needs, at what interval, and who is responsible for doing it.
DefinitionA service history is the complete record of maintenance, repairs and inspections carried out on a specific item, with dates, work done and cost.
DefinitionPreventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
DefinitionEquipment downtime is time during which equipment is unavailable for its intended use, whether because it has failed or because it is being serviced.
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