A maintenance ticketing system is the helpdesk idea applied to maintenance: a request comes in, gets a ticket, is assigned, and is closed when the requester is satisfied. It suits a building with occupants raising requests, and it is where many facilities teams start. This page says what a ticket is against a work order, when a ticketing system is enough, and where it stops being enough, which is the moment the site wants to know what was done to an asset over its life rather than whether a requester was answered.
What a ticket is
A conversation about a problem, with a status. It has a requester, a description, an assignee, notes, and a close. Its unit is the request, and its measure is how fast requests are answered. It is the right shape for a reception desk, an IT helpdesk, and a building where the occupants report what they see. A maintenance ticketing system is that tool with maintenance categories and a floor plan.
What a work order is
A job on an asset, with a type, a priority from consequence, the findings, the parts, the times and the follow-up, filed against the asset so that its history accumulates. Its unit is the asset, and its measures are the reactive share, compliance, MTTR and the repeaters. The same request that becomes a ticket in a helpdesk becomes a work order against the boiler in a CMMS, and the difference shows a year later when someone asks what has been done to that boiler.
When ticketing is enough
When the equipment is simple, the requests are mostly about the building rather than about machines, and the site does not run a preventive schedule of its own because contractors service the plant. A ticketing system answers occupants well and keeps a log of requests. It does not raise preventive work orders from a schedule, and it does not roll history up to an asset, so the site that grows into a schedule finds it has the wrong tool.
When the record has to be against an asset
When the site owns equipment it maintains itself, when it has statutory tests to record, when the same fault keeps coming back and nobody can say how often, or when a manager asks for the reactive share. Each of those needs the asset as the unit, and most CMMS products include the request form the ticketing system had, so nothing is lost by moving. The maintenance log worksheet on this site is the asset-based record on paper, and it is where a team can test whether its requests are really jobs on assets.
Questions people ask about maintenance ticketing system
Can a ticketing system be used as a CMMS?
For requests, yes. For a preventive schedule and an asset history, no, and forcing it produces tickets against assets with no interval and no history.
Does a CMMS have a ticketing function?
Most have a request form and a queue, which is the ticketing function. The work order behind it is what the ticketing system lacks.
Which should a school or an office start with?
A ticketing system if the plant is on contract and the requests are about the building. A CMMS as soon as the site owns a schedule.