A work order is the record of one job on one asset: what needed doing, who did it, when, and what they found. That is all it is, and the reason it matters is not administration. Every interval on a maintenance schedule is a guess until somebody can look back at what the last three visits to that machine actually found, and the work order is the only place that evidence ever lives. A team that raises work orders badly still gets the work done; what it loses is the ability to say, a year later, whether the schedule was right. This page sets out what belongs on one, which fields get dropped, and what dropping them costs.
One job, one asset, one work order
The temptation is to raise a work order per visit or per day, because it reads tidier and there are fewer of them. It also destroys the history: three jobs on three machines recorded as one visit tells you nothing about any of the three when you come to review their intervals. If a technician touched two assets, that is two work orders, and any system that makes that annoying is a system that will quietly teach your team to under-record.
The fields that always get filled in
The asset, the date, the person, and a description of the job. These are the ones every template has and every team completes, because they are what a supervisor asks for. They are enough to prove work happened and not enough to improve anything, which is why a work-order record that stops here is a compliance artefact rather than a maintenance one.
The two fields that get dropped, and cost the most
What was FOUND, and how long it took. 'PM completed' is a tick; 'PM completed, belt showing wear on the drive side, replaced' is the sentence that justifies changing an interval two years later. Time is the other: without it you cannot price the schedule, and pricing the schedule is how it survives a budget round. On the worked example this site publishes, the difference between a breakdown job at 3.4 hours and the same job planned at 1.1 is $110.40 in labour, and you can only see that if somebody wrote both numbers down.
What a work order is not
It is not a purchase order, it is not a job for a customer, and it is not a permit. A permit to work, a lockout/tagout procedure and an isolation certificate are separate documents with separate legal weight, and a work order that pretends to be one is a hazard rather than a shortcut.
Questions people ask about what is a work order
What is the difference between a work order and a work request?
A request is somebody asking; a work order is the job once it has been accepted, prioritised and assigned. Keeping them separate is what stops a request board becoming a to-do list nobody owns, and it is the point where priority actually gets set.
Should a technician raise their own work orders?
Yes, at the machine, on a phone. A work order written up at a desk on Friday from memory is a report rather than a record, and its hours are always rounder than the real ones.
How long should a work order stay open?
Until the work is done and signed off, not until somebody tidies the list. A board full of jobs closed for neatness is worse than a long board, because it hides the backlog that predicts the next breakdown.