8 Ways Inefficient Work Order Management Is Costing Your Business

Introduction

Ah, work orders…For operators of multi-location brands and service providers alike, work orders are critical. If not managed wisely, they’re nearly impossible to keep up with.

From creation and dispatch to execution and closure, managing work orders (WOs) across their lifecycle for an average multilocation retailer is a daily grind. Given that the average organization works with numerous service providers, issuing a high volume of WOs, each requiring a considerable amount of time to resolve, efficient management practices are critical for controlling maintenance
costs, reducing store downtime, and maximizing profitability.

While most organizations leverage some form of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to manage and track WOs, traditional solutions lack the automation and flexibility features necessary to optimize their work cycles at scale. To avoid these pitfalls and minimize waste, teams should understand the wider impact of these risks, and consider the benefits a modern CMMS approach can offer to a businesses’ bottom-line.

Who feels the pain of wasteful work order management?

Inefficient work order management affects various stakeholders across an organization, leading to significant operational and financial challenges. These include:

Facilities Management Teams
FM teams must juggle multiple WOs across various vendors and locations, often leading to burnout and inefficiency.

Location Managers
Delays in addressing critical issues can disrupt operations and impact revenue.

Service Providers
The livelihood of service providers depends on efficient WO management, and inefficiencies can harm their response and resolution times.

Operations
Inefficient WO management can lead to operational disruptions and decreased productivity.

Finance
Overspending and declining profitability are direct consequences of poor WO management, impacting overall financial health.

Marketing
Customer experience and brand reputation suffer when WOs are mismanaged, leading to dissatisfied customers.

What are some common work order inefficiencies and how to address them with a smarter CMMS approach?

Multiple Assignments for Vendors

The Challenge: Complicated maintenance issues often require multiple technicians across various trades, leading to excessive paperwork and poor communication, which delays resolution and increases downtime.

The Fix: Utilize a CMMS solution that allows for multiple assignments per work order across different trades. This ensures tasks are promptly assigned to the right professionals, improving coordination and accelerating issue resolution. Automation streamlines processes, reducing manual intervention and ensuring efficient handling of maintenance issues, even in emergency situations. Look for a provider with a network of vetted vendors further ensures quick and reliable service, enhancing operational efficiency and minimizing disruptions.

Faster Dispatching

The Challenge: Time-sensitive maintenance work often faces delays due to slow dispatching processes. These delays can result in extended downtime, which disrupts business operations, affects customer satisfaction, and can lead to significant revenue losses. For instance, an HVAC failure in a busy retail environment can create an uncomfortable shopping experience, driving customers away and reducing sales. Slow dispatching also burdens FM teams with managing backlogs and dealing with escalating issues, diverting their attention from strategic tasks.

The Fix: A fully automated CMMS can reduce dispatch times by 60% or more, ensuring work orders are quickly assigned to the appropriate vendors or technicians. Automation streamlines the dispatch process by using predefined criteria to match work orders with the best-suited service providers, minimizing
delays and improving response times. This also enhances the accuracy of vendor assignments, ensuring that the right technician is dispatched for each job. By implementing automated dispatching, FM teams can focus on more critical tasks, ultimately improving overall operational efficiency.

Proposal Processing

The Challenge: Reviewing, sending, receiving, and approving or rejecting proposals can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process. This often leads to bottlenecks that slow down maintenance workflows and delay critical decisions. Manual proposal processing can result in errors, miscommunication, and inconsistencies, complicating the approval process and potentially leading to disputes between FM teams and service providers. The lack of a streamlined process also means that urgent maintenance tasks may be delayed, impacting overall efficiency and service quality.

The Fix: Look for a platform with advanced approval rules that can streamline the process. This type of automation feature can help define scenarios for enforcing certain processes, and should also allow easy access of what needs approval either via dashboards inside the system, or directly through email notifications even without logging in. This approach ensures that proposals are reviewed and approved efficiently, reducing bottlenecks, minimizing errors and inconsistencies, and providing a clear and efficient communication channel between FM teams and service providers. This then improves the overall maintenance process and enables faster resolution of issues.

Streamlining Check-Ins

The Challenge: Vendor check-ins and outs can be inefficient and poorly tracked, leading to inaccuracies in work order management and accountability. Manual check-ins often result in delays, missed entries, and difficulties in verifying the presence and work of vendors. This lack of efficiency can hinder the timely completion of maintenance tasks and create gaps in tracking vendor performance. Poorly managed check-ins can also lead to disputes over billing and service delivery, complicating the relationship between FM teams and vendors.

The Fix: Implement geo-fence technology to manage vendor check-ins and outs more efficiently, ensuring accurate tracking and accountability. Seek a platform that uses GPS to validate if vendors are within an acceptable range of the store address while checking in. This prevents check-ins and outs if their location cannot be validated, ensuring precise tracking. Accurate check-in data also enhances billing and performance tracking, allowing FM teams to verify that vendors are meeting their contractual obligations and delivering quality service. By leveraging geo-fence technology, businesses can enhance operational efficiency and maintain better control over vendor activities.

Work Completion Confirmation

The Challenge: Confirming work completion can be slow and prone to delays, leading to extended downtime and unresolved issues. Manual confirmation processes are often inefficient, relying on paperwork and manual entries that can be easily overlooked or delayed. This slows down the verification and closure of work orders, impacting the overall efficiency of the maintenance workflow and delaying the resumption of normal operations. Inaccurate or delayed work completion confirmation can also affect billing and payment processes, leading to disputes and financial discrepancies.

The Fix: Implement automated systems to enhance the work order completion process, ensuring timely verification and closure. Seek out a platform that, upon the completion of an assignment, automatically sends an email to the store manager, prompting them to provide feedback and confirm that the work has
been completed. Automation ensures that they receive timely notifications to expedite this process. A best-in-class system can advance the status to maintain workflow continuity. Automated systems can also create a clear audit trail, documenting each step of the work order process and ensuring transparency and accountability. By incorporating these automated elements into work completion confirmation, businesses can reduce downtime, enhance operational efficiency, and improve the accuracy of their maintenance workflows.

Invoice Integration

The Challenge: Generating invoices manually is time-consuming and error prone, leading to delays and inaccuracies in financial processes. Manual invoicing requires significant administrative effort, increasing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. This can result in disputes over billing, delayed payments, and
increased administrative costs. Inefficient invoicing processes also strain the relationship between FM teams and vendors, as discrepancies and delays create frustration and mistrust.

The Fix: Utilize full invoice integration to enhance the final processing phase of invoicing, simplifying financial tasks and reducing administrative burden. While vendors are still responsible for creating and submitting invoices manually, integration connects maintenance management systems with accounting
software. This automates the final processing and communication of payable invoices to accounting, ensuring accuracy and consistency. This integration speeds up the invoicing process, facilitating timely payments and improving cash flow. By implementing invoice integration, businesses can streamline their
financial processes, enhance accuracy, and reduce the administrative workload, fostering better relationships with vendors and improving overall operational efficiency.

Preventative Maintenance (PM) Programs

The Challenge: Manually creating work orders for recurring services is laborintensive and time-consuming. This inefficiency can lead to delays, errors, and inconsistencies, impacting the overall maintenance workflow. The lack of automation in scheduling and managing preventative maintenance tasks often results in increased break/fix requests, as equipment may not receive timely maintenance. Reactive work tends to be more expensive and disruptive than preventative maintenance, leading to higher overall expenses and more frequent operational interruptions.

The Fix: Implement automated PM programs to streamline recurring services, reducing the labor and manual effort required for individual work orders. Automation ensures consistent maintenance scheduling, significantly reducing break/fix requests and minimizing downtime. Advanced PM programs also offer automatic vendor acceptance and invoice creation, further enhancing efficiency. By shifting from reactive to preventative maintenance, businesses can lower overall expenses, extend asset lifespan, and improve operational performance.

Following Up

The Challenge: Manually following up on work orders due to missed check-outs, response deadlines, and other issues is inefficient and time-consuming. This manual process often leads to delays, missed follow-ups, and unresolved issues, impacting the overall efficiency of the maintenance workflow. FM teams spend significant time and effort chasing down vendors and ensuring compliance, diverting resources from more critical tasks. Inefficient follow-up processes also affect vendor accountability and performance, leading to inconsistencies in service delivery.

The Fix: Implement automated follow-ups to ensure all tasks are completed on time and to the required standard, eliminating the need for manual follow-ups. Automated systems send reminders and notifications to vendors, ensuring that deadlines are met and tasks are completed as scheduled. This reduces the administrative burden on FM teams and ensures timely and consistent followups. Automation also provides a clear record of follow-up actions, enhancing accountability and transparency. By implementing automated follow-ups, businesses can ensure that maintenance tasks are completed efficiently, improving overall workflow and operational performance.

How can you protect your bottom line with automated facilities management?

Effective work order management is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency and protecting your bottom line. By addressing common inefficiencies with a smarter CMMS approach, FM teams, location managers, service providers, operations, finance, and marketing departments can all benefit. Implementing automation and leveraging advanced technology can transform how WOs are managed, leading to significant time and cost savings, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Fexa’s advanced CMMS capabilities allow for businesses to overcome the challenges of traditional work order management and achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in their operations.