Common mistakes with work orders

Almost every maintenance system that runs poorly has poorly designed work orders, and almost always for the same six reasons. None of them requires redoing the rollout: they’re fixed with configuration decisions and judgment.

Here’s the list, with what needs to change in each case.

1. Asking for fields nobody looks at

The most common mistake and the one that generates the most resistance. Multiplied across every order in the year, each useless field is technician hours and one more reason to fill things out quickly.

How to know if it’s unnecessary. Ask who consults that data and for which decision. If there’s no concrete answer, it’s unnecessary.

How to fix it. Remove it. And if someone defends it “just in case,” the cost of that “just in case” is that the fields that do matter get filled in worse.

2. Statuses with an ambiguous meaning

“In progress” means different things to different people, and six months in nobody knows whether an order in that status has started, is stalled, or is waiting on materials.

How to fix it. Define five statuses with an agreed meaning — a one-hour conversation — and use the specific statuses that exist for what actually happens: waiting for materials and needs a return visit. Without them, that work ends up in a notebook.

And attach a maximum time to each status, so that what’s overdue shows up in a list instead of being discovered when the client complains.

3. Closing without data

An order closed with “done” is useless afterward. It doesn’t let you calculate cost, analyze why something keeps happening, or prove what was done.

The minimum: time measured with a timer inside the order itself, materials consumed against the warehouse and, when there’s a checklist, it should be filled in.

How to enforce it without a fight. On preventive orders the app won’t let you close until the checklist is complete. For the rest, the lever isn’t the obligation: it’s giving the technician something in return — the equipment’s history and its documentation on the phone, not having to write up paper reports later.

4. Not linking the order to the asset

The silent mistake. The order is created against a client and an address, but without the specific machine.

It works just as well today and makes everything two years from now impossible: you won’t be able to know how much it costs to maintain that equipment, how many times it has failed, or whether it’s worth replacing.

How to fix it. Register the assets with their family and give them a QR code, so linking means scanning instead of searching through a list.

5. Logging hours at the end of the day

They always come out lower than reality, and with them the cost of the intervention becomes a guess and a contract’s margin becomes a hope.

How to fix it. A timer inside the order, and having the app work without coverage — because the work happens in basements and machine rooms. If you need a signal to log something, it gets logged in the afternoon, from memory.

The indicator that gives this problem away is the deviation between estimated and actual time: if it’s systematically favorable, times probably aren’t being measured.

6. What’s detected goes nowhere

The mistake that kills entire systems. A technician logs an anomaly during a review, and nothing happens. By the third time they stop logging it, and rightly so.

How to fix it. The anomaly has to turn into an incident with its priority and its owner, or into an explicit decision to do nothing. Both outcomes are valid; silence isn’t.

It’s also the channel through which a preventive plan actually reduces corrective work: not by reviewing more, but because what’s spotted during the review ends up as planned work instead of a breakdown three months later.

7. Notifying about everything

The opposite extreme, and almost as damaging. If the system alerts on every internal change, people stop reading the alerts, and then the important ones stop getting through too.

How to fix it. Mark which statuses shouldn’t notify, and who each one alerts. That option exists precisely for this.

8. Putting non-maintenance work into the plan

Errands, administrative tasks, accompanying a supplier, opening a door. It’s not that they shouldn’t be done — it’s that if they go in as preventive orders they pollute every indicator. They inflate the percentage of plan executed and make the preventive-to-corrective ratio look better than it is.

How to fix it. Separate them by type so they can be filtered out in the reports. Then the real figure of how much of the team’s time goes into technical work shows up, which is usually a lot less than everyone thought.

9. Leaving subcontractors outside the system

If part of the work is done by outside companies and their reports live in their own system, the history has gaps exactly where the most expensive interventions are. And there’s no way to check whether what was contracted is actually being done.

How to fix it. Register them as suppliers, so they receive the orders that correspond to them and log times, materials, documentation and signatures just like in-house staff. Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, it isn’t a budget decision.

10. Never reviewing the configuration

The nine mistakes above get fixed once. This one is what makes them come back.

A work order configuration is a hypothesis about how the company works, and companies change. Half an hour a quarter, with the reports in front of you, is enough to spot fields nobody fills in anymore, statuses that have fallen out of use, and alerts people ignore.

How to figure out which one affects you

A thirty-minute review with the reports in front of you:

If the time deviation is always favorable → mistake 5. If there are many orders closed without an asset → mistake 4. If corrective work doesn’t drop despite having a plan → mistakes 6 or 8. If nobody looks at the alerts → mistake 7. If the team complains about how long it takes to close an order → mistake 1.

What isn’t a mistake

Some orders closing without a checklist because they don’t need one. Having corrective work. Rescheduling the plan often.

All three are normal, and chasing them as if they were failures is the fastest way to make the system feel like a burden.

If you want to review how your work orders are set up, you can request a demo or get in touch.