Work order software is demonstrated on dashboards and bought on them, and the dashboard is the least important part. What a work order system has to do is much shorter: let a technician raise a job at the machine in under a minute, tie that job to one asset and one asset only, make the found field hard to skip, and count reactive against planned without anybody exporting anything. A product that does those four things well is worth more than one that does forty things adequately, and the four are easy to test in a demo if you know to ask. This page is that test.
Raising a job has to take under a minute
The single behaviour that decides whether a system works is whether technicians raise jobs at the machine or write them up later. Anything that takes more than a minute on a phone with dirty hands gets deferred to the end of the shift, and end-of-shift records are rounder, thinner and later. Ask to raise one on a phone in the demo, timed, rather than watching somebody do it on a laptop.
One job, one asset, enforced
A system that lets a work order sit against a location, a department or nothing at all will be used that way within a month, and the asset history you bought it for will not exist. This is worth testing by trying to do the wrong thing: if the software cheerfully accepts a work order with no asset, the history it produces is optional and therefore absent.
The found field, and how hard it is to skip
Every product has a notes box. The question is whether closing a job without saying what was found is easy, and it should not be. This is the field that carries the only evidence you will ever have for changing an interval, and a system that treats it as optional produces a year of 'PM completed' and nothing to reason with.
Reactive against planned, without an export
The ratio is the health of the function in one number. On the worked example this site publishes, 240 work orders a month at 35% reactive is 84 breakdowns and 193.2 avoidable hours, $9,273.60 a month. If a system cannot show that split on its own, you will compute it twice and then stop.
Questions people ask about work order software
Is a work order system the same as a CMMS?
A CMMS is the register, the schedule and the work orders together. Work order software is the last of those three, and buying it alone works only if the register and the schedule genuinely live somewhere else and are kept.
Do we need offline capability?
If your plant rooms, basements or yards have no signal, yes, and it is worth testing rather than trusting: ask to raise a job in airplane mode. A system that loses a work order raised in a basement will be blamed for the missing history it caused.
How much should it cost?
Price it against your own reactive number rather than against other vendors. On the worked example here that is $9,273.60 a month of avoidable labour; a subscription is either small or large against your version of that figure.