A maintenance request is somebody telling you something is wrong, and it is deliberately not the same thing as a work order. A request is a report; a work order is the job once somebody has accepted it as work worth doing, prioritised it and assigned it. Keeping the two separate is what stops a maintenance board becoming a to-do list nobody owns, and it is the point at which priority actually gets decided rather than inherited from whoever shouted. This page is about the request half: what it needs, who makes it, and how to make reporting so quick that people bother.
Three fields and a photograph is the realistic ceiling
The people reporting faults are not maintenance staff. They will give you where, what, and a picture, and they will abandon anything longer. A QR code by the door that opens a three-field form beats a portal login every time, because a login is a barrier in front of information you want.
A request is not yet a commitment
Accepting a request as a work order is a decision, and rejecting one with a reason is a legitimate outcome. What is not legitimate is a request quietly ageing with no decision, which is what happens when requests and work orders live in the same list.
Tell the requester what happened
Most repeat chasing comes from people who cannot see that their job is queued and why. A one-line status visible to the person who reported it costs almost nothing and removes most of the follow-up traffic a maintenance office handles.
Requests are also data about the plant
Three requests about the same machine in a quarter is a signal even if each was small. A request log that cannot be grouped by asset throws that signal away, which is the practical reason requests should carry an asset wherever the reporter can identify one.
Questions people ask about maintenance request
Should we use a form or let people email?
A form, because email cannot be counted, grouped or aged. If people email anyway, that is evidence the form is too long.
What is the difference between a request and a work order?
A request is somebody asking. A work order is the accepted, prioritised, assigned job. The gap between them is where a maintenance function decides what it is going to do.
Should requesters be able to set priority?
They can suggest it. Priority should be set from consequence by somebody who can see the whole board, or every request arrives urgent within a month.