A work order request form is filled in by people whose job is not maintenance, usually while they are doing something else, and every field you add reduces the number of faults you hear about. That is the whole design constraint and it is routinely ignored, because forms get designed by the people who will process them rather than by the people who will complete them. A form asking twelve questions produces fewer, later reports and a maintenance office that hears about problems by email instead. This page is about the short version.
Three fields: where, what, and a photograph
Location or asset, a sentence about the problem, and a picture. That is enough to triage, and triage is what the maintenance team is for. Anything else you need can be asked once, of one person, rather than of everybody in advance.
Do not ask the requester to set priority
They will, honestly, from their own point of view, and within a month everything is urgent. Ask what the impact is in plain words instead: 'can you still work?' produces better triage than a five-point urgency scale.
A QR code by the door beats a portal login
For somebody who reports a fault twice a year, a login is a barrier in front of information you want. A code on the machine or by the door that opens a three-field form is the difference between hearing about a problem today and hearing about it when it stops something.
Close the loop back to the requester
One line of status, visible to whoever reported it. Most chasing comes from people who cannot see that their job is queued, and answering that in advance costs less than answering it repeatedly on the phone.
Questions people ask about work order request form
Should the form ask for a cost centre?
Almost never at the request stage. Add it during triage if you need it; asking a requester for accounting information is how a form goes unused.
Can requests come in by email?
They will anyway. Route a mailbox into the system if you can, but treat heavy email use as evidence the form is too long.
Is a paper request form still reasonable?
In a plant with no phones on the floor, yes, with a box and a daily collection. The failure mode is the collection, not the paper.