How digital work orders replace paper-based maintenance tracking

What paper costs in practice

A paper job sheet does its job on the day and is hard to find afterwards. It goes into a binder or a filing cabinet. When someone asks what was done to a pump last spring, the answer depends on who filed the sheet and whether the handwriting can be read.

The costs are ordinary ones, and you will recognise them:

• The walk back. Collecting the next job from the office, and typing up notes after the work, is time away from the equipment.
• The job done twice. Nobody can confirm a task was finished, so it is done again, or not at all.
• The history nobody can search. The third failure of the same bearing looks like the first, because the two earlier sheets are in a drawer.
• The missing record. An auditor, an insurer or a supplier asks for the service history, and someone spends a day looking for it.

We have no figure for what this costs you. Count the minutes for your own team for a week; that number is the one that matters.

A work order from request to sign-off

In Powoflow, a work order sits on the asset it is for, and stays in that asset's history. This is how one job runs, as the work orders page describes it:

• Request. Someone on your team raises a request, and an approver turns it into a work order on the right asset.
• Assign and follow. The work order is open, in progress, on hold or complete. Putting a job on hold or cancelling it needs a reason, so the record shows why planned work stopped.
• Checklist. The tasks for the job are a checklist. A required check has to be answered before the job can close, and the checklist locks once the work order is closed.
• Time, parts, photos. Log the time spent and the parts used, and attach photos and files to the job, where the next person will look.
• Sign-off. A signature is captured at the end. It records who signed the job off, and when.

If your team asks for it, a corrective job also records what failed and why when it is completed. Over time that gives you a list of failures you can compare, in place of free-text notes.

At the asset

Every asset in the asset register has a QR code. Scan it to open the asset's record, its history and its open work. Powoflow runs in the browser, so that works on the phone or tablet the technician already carries, wherever there is a connection.

Planning the next one

A maintenance plan is a schedule on an asset. It runs on dates. When the job falls due, the plan raises the work order, so the next service is not in someone's head. This is the preventive maintenance part of a CMMS.

You can export your work orders as a spreadsheet whenever you like. The records are kept for as long as your workspace exists.

What it does not do yet

• Maintenance plans run on dates. Meter-based plans, such as a service every so many running hours, are not available yet.
• A signature records who signed and when. If your procedure needs several signatures in a fixed order, or a permit to work, ask us before you rely on it.
• A photo task on a work order checklist can be closed without a photo.
• Work orders export as a spreadsheet. Asset records do not yet: ask and we will export them for you.
• In the browser you need a connection.