A maintenance work order form has six fields that earn their place and a long tail of fields that get added because somebody once wanted them. The six are the asset, the date, the person, what the job was, what was found and how long it took. Every one of those is used later. Most of the rest, cost centre, purchase order, customer, equipment sub-type, gets filled in inconsistently, is never queried, and lengthens a form that is already competing with a technician's patience. This page is the six and how to defend them against the tail.
The asset, unambiguously, and preferably scanned
Not a location, not a department. The asset is what makes the form filable and the history answerable, and a form without it produces a record that cannot be looked up when it matters, which is a year later when somebody asks about that pump.
What was found, in a sentence
The one field that turns a completed form into evidence. Without it you can prove work happened and cannot show why an interval should change, which means the schedule can never improve. It is also the first field dropped under time pressure, which is why it needs to be prominent rather than at the bottom.
Hours, honestly, and not in half-days
The schedule is priced in hours: 66 a month on the worked example this site publishes, $3,168 at a $48 loaded rate. A form that collects 'morning' cannot feed that arithmetic and the arithmetic is what defends the schedule when the budget is questioned.
Resist the tail, or accept that it will be blank
Every additional field is a small tax on every job. If a field is not queried by somebody at least quarterly, it is decoration, and decoration on a form filled in with gloves on becomes noise that hides the six fields that matter.
Questions people ask about maintenance work order form
Should the form capture parts used?
Only if you hold stores and reconcile them. A parts field with no stores process behind it produces a list nobody trusts.
Do we need a signature?
A name is enough for internal work. Signatures matter where a third party did the work or where a regulator expects an attributable record.
Paper or a ticket system?
Whichever gets filled in at the machine. A ticket system that is slower than a paper card will produce worse data than the card it replaced.